Patagonia CEO talks about company’s radical restructuring to fight climate change
'There is no business to be done on a dead planet'
Austin Colbert/The Aspen Times
Yvon Chouinard gave Ryan Gellert the simplest of tasks. All he wanted was for Gellert, his latest successor as Patagonia’s frontman, to redesign the business structure to where it could give away most of its profits to environmental causes while remaining fiscally sound.
And then, as he does, Chouinard went fishing.
“It is so classically Yvon,” Gellert said Sunday evening as part of an Aspen Ideas Festival session inside Paepcke Auditorium, moderated by comedian and writer Baratunde Thurston. “He’s just such an unbelievably contrarian thinker. He had thought for many, many years — I would say decades — about what to do with Patagonia. He never wanted to be a businessman. He lives a really simple life. He drives an old Subaru.”
With Chouinard — who founded Patagonia in 1973 en route to becoming one of the most influential people in the outdoor world — enjoying the simpler side of life, Gellert went to work. He said it took about 18 months from that initial talk to figure out the details, but last fall Gellert and the outdoors clothing company announced a radical new business approach.
With Chouinard’s blessing, Patagonia’s ownership was transferred to the Holdfast Collective and the Patagonia Purpose Trust. The idea is that the collective controls the money, and the trust controls the voting stock within the company. Any profit that doesn’t go back into the business now goes into fighting climate change.
As Gellert put it Sunday, Patagonia is a for-profit business that just happens to give most of its profits away.
“He just kept continuing to believe there was value in Patagonia continuing to exist as a model for a different kind of business,” Gellert said of Chouinard. “I’ve got two young kids. I care about them deeply. The truth is there is zero chance they will inherit the planet in the shape that I grew up with. Period. I think that ship has sailed. I think it is humanly possible that we reverse the impact that we’ve had, but I’m not confident that we will. I feel like instead we got a responsibility to just show up and do everything we can.”
Patagonia’s restructuring is a radical new approach to business and the fight against climate change. Still, Gellert, who became Patagonia’s CEO in 2020 amid the pandemic, never tried to play up the new model as anything that will save the planet, but as a small step in making real differences. He hopes other businesses will follow suit with similar thinking, but his experience talking to other executives paints a picture of sorrow.
“There is no business to be done on a dead planet,” Gellert said of what he likes to tell businesses that choose profit over anything else. “For people in companies that think in quarters, I don’t know how to wean you off that drug. But if you are thinking in decades, it seems to me it’s radically obvious the changes we need to make.”
Patagonia’s makeover also included internal policy changes, a key catalyst being the May 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. His death — Derek Chauvin was later sentenced to 21 years in prison for Floyd’s murder — led to protests across the country.
For Gellert, who wasn’t yet CEO when Floyd was killed, this led to a discussion on what else the company could do to make a positive difference in the world. The same sort of discussion Chouinard had already been having for decades.
“We probably got all the technologies that we need. All the solutions are available, if we can just deploy them,” Gellert said of what’s needed to fight climate change. “Then I thought to myself, isn’t that true about eradicating poverty? Isn’t that true with feeding the population around the world? Isn’t that true with equity, equality and justice? And it has been for decades, if not longer. We’ve just not demonstrated the will to do that.”
He continued, “I’m not terribly optimistic, but I’m deeply, deeply committed to doing everything we can to reverse the climate and ecological crisis.”
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