I see Patagonia as the antithesis of this broadly accepted assertion.
It's possible, it just takes having a goal for your company that's more than greed.
[1]: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/an-update-on-microfiber-po...
Patagonia do make high performance plastic products for activities where performance matters and in a better way than most, but have not been a performance focused company for decades. The original breakthrough of using plastic fleece in the wilderness due to it's non water absorbing properties doesn't really justify the size of their production with those materials today. They make most of their money selling plastic fleeces for people to wear to coffee shops. This segment of the market didn't realy exist before brands like Patagonia so they while they may offer a better alternative today, they are helped to create this particular problem.
And if you've ever seen their clearance lists, they're as bad as other fashion companies for overproduction - new colours every season which need to make way the following season.
Replacing plastics in their casual ranges and extending the lifecycles of the colours alone would make a bigger difference than a couple of research grants, but is risky for sales and less sexy. So take those statements with a pinch of salt.
Not a perfect company, I mean almost all of their iconic garments are plastic, but they're doing far more than other technical outerwear companies.
I wear it about a third of the year here in Seattle. In the five years I have owned it I have washed it maybe once and possibly never. I don’t even wear it in the rain often because I have a rain shell which is also plastic and also doesn’t get washed.
I do also have some hemp pants from Patagonia. I wear those often. They made it about three years before they needed to go in to have pockets repaired from cell phone damage. Those fibers require farm land and water to grow. Repairs help mitigate that damage but it still exists.
I’m honestly not sure which garment has the most negative effect on the environment.
I would assert that there does not exist a company which is both larger than Patagonia, and more moral than they are.
I'm gonna use that statement from now on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate...
https://qz.com/patagonia-s-3-billion-corporate-gift-is-also-...
That NYT piece is, more or less, a fluff piece; and, it's also worth noting, this same maneuver is frequently used in ways that are probably seen less "charitably," given the political influence 501(c)(4)s' potentially wield.
Chouinard's goal was for his mission (the raison d'etre for Patagonia – to make high quality goods for outdoor activities, and to use the profits from this venture to protect outdoor spaces) to outlive his personal stewardship of Patagonia's control.
When that's your goal, the set of options available is rather narrow. You have to pass on control to people you trust, whom you've developed strong relationships with, and whom you trust to evolve and pass that mission down to the next generation. Most importantly, you want to avoid the kind of grifters that Patagonia has been allergic to in its history.
Plus, Patagonia already has a rich synergistic history of funding activism. It's not at all comparable to Gates, Carnegie, or Rockefeller who made their money and decided what "good" to spend it on in two discrete steps. For Patagonia, the most important thing is effective stewardship over an already-sailing ship
Chouinard has written a lot of material that you can read for yourself and form your own opinion on. He's remarkably direct and transparent, there aren't really smoke and mirrors to navigate.
That being said, anything he does with his "wealth" (itself an absurd idea, as he would never liquidate Patagonia shares and still never has) is going to rhyme with what other powerful people do with their wealth. You have to judge the people, not just the structures they're working within.
Seriously- I’ve had my eye on a Patagonia black hole duffle and now I’ll pull the trigger.
- The guy who now has too many nanopuff jackets, but I will die on this hill.
Remember this whenever you see founders say that they didn't betray their original agreements. They betrayed those agreements as soon as they accepted VC funding or public trading, because that's when they agreed to lose control of the direction of the company.
If you keep a company private, and you don't take sizable outside funding, you can pretty much do whatever you want with your company.
The parts of Reddit that people actually like – a single lightweight web app (old.reddit.com) minus all the fluff (constant redesigns, broken video player, live streaming service, overengineered mobile apps, avatars, NFTs, coins/gifts, social networking, chat, clubhouse competitor, expensive acquisitions) – would have survived perfectly well without VC money.
Fashion benefits from exclusivity and brand identity. It behooves Patagonia to brand itself as "not evil" or "not capitalist" or whatever, it's ultimately a fashion statement.
Social networks suffer from exclusivity, and brand identity is an afterthought. I'd wager that most Reddit users have a neutral/negative view of the Reddit brand, but they use Reddit anyways because of network effects (everyone is there) and the brand doesn't really impact their favorite subreddits. There have been many attempts at "exclusive" social networks with carefully crafted brand identity, and they always fail.
There's a theory that social media also has fashion phases, but I don't think we have enough data to back that up. MySpace lasted about 6 years. Facebook is 19 and Twitter is 17 and both are going strong.
