No Such Thing as a Sustainable Company: Lessons from Patagonia

By Kate Olsen

Making headlines with its plea to consumers to buy less, Patagonia has certainly emerged as a company to watch for its brand marketing savvy and sustainable business practices.  By inviting consumers to play a vital role in the company’s environmental impact, Patagonia is proving that a brand’s value proposition must include a social benefit factor to win in today’s crowded and noisy marketing arena.

How do you make that social benefit factor part and parcel of your company’s DNA?  Patagonia has some ideas.

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard has a new book out, co-written with his nephew Vincent Stanley, offering advice to companies on how to prioritize and implement sustainability initiatives.  I consider The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned From Patagonia’s First 40 Years  a corporate responsibility primer, complete with checklists of policies and practices to inform how the business operates, recruits and retains employees, serves customers, builds community and protects nature. For those well-versed in sustainability trends and approaches, this meditation does not surprise, but it does provide helpful reminders.  In the end, responsible business is about being human: aiming for greatness, learning from mistakes and continuing to press onward – a fitting lesson from two men who originally set out to climb and conquer mountains.

Chouinard and Stanley argue that no business in operation today has earned the right to call itself a sustainably company – there is just too much of a gap between how we do business and what we need to do to truly protect our environment and natural resources.  For the authors, honor and respect are derived not from the label ‘sustainable’, but from the attempt to do business better.  

Want to see some examples of how Patagonia is striving to do business better?

Read on, via CompaniesforGood.org