The unfortunate death of Doug Tompkins, the founder of Northside, once again aroused the ardent attention of entrepreneurs to engage in environmental protection. In fact, there is also a global outdoor brand that imprints environmental protection into the company's corporate culture. Its name is Patagonia, and its founder is Yvon Chouinard, who topped Fitz Roy with Douglas.
I believe mountain friends are familiar with the two brands Black Diamond and Patagonia. Both companies were founded by Yvonn Joyner, but Joynard has always been ashamed to admit that he is a businessman (from his autobiography "Let My People Go Surfing"). In his opinion, "climbing is more fun than making money."
You can climb before you walk
Climber is one of Joynard's positioning for himself, and this experience starts with his teenage years.
Joynard's father Simard is from Quebec, Canada and is a hard-working French Canadian. When Joynard was very young, his father would always tempt him to climb the stairs with a spoonful of honey upstairs in the rented house. He regarded this as the beginning of his own climbing life and once said, "I think I will definitely climb before I learn to walk."
1946, Joynard moved his family to California. At that time, at the age of 8, he had to play with himself most of the time because of the differences in language and culture (he originally spoke French but could not speak English at that time). During this period, Joynard developed many game projects: fishing, catching frogs, catching lobsters, etc., and gradually became interested in hunting. At the age of 15, he and music teacher Robert Klimes and UCLA graduate Tom Cade set up Southern California Falconry to train falcon hunting. Among the members of the
club is an adult mountain climber Don Prentice who teaches Joynard how to wrap the hemp rope around his hips and how to use the scapula to control the sliding speed (i.e. the rope-drifting method) to approach the eagle nest on the cliff. At that time, he regarded this move as the greatest sport in the world and began to practice, improve and innovate continuously.
Since then, Joynard often trains to bend down on the sandstone cliffs of Stony Point. Just one day after successfully sliding through a rock crack, he began to experience the fun of climbing the cliff and was out of control.
16, Joynard and some companions came to Wind River Range in the north of Pine Dale, Wyoming, and made an appointment to climb Gannett Peak (the highest mountain range in Wyoming). At that time, he proposed to go up from the west, but others suggested going through the Nai Valley to the north. In the end, he was the only one who headed west and reached the top of the mountain after climbing over many cliffs. Unfortunately, there happened to be a thunderstorm that night, so Joynard, wearing Sears' flat work boots, had to dodge everywhere on the hill.
However, the thunderstorm could not stop Joynard's fanaticism about mountaineering. On a drive to Teton, Kota, he met two climbers planning to climb the Templetons Crack in Symmetry Spire, and he had his first real rope climbing. When climbing, he kept rushing in front. On the way, he led the team to cross a wet and sticky crack that was the hardest to walk on, and found out how to use rock nails and hammers. Every year since then, Joynard has been running to Dakota to climb for 3 months.
After returning to California, Joynard would go to Stoney Point to climb mountaineering in winter, and in spring and autumn, he would go to Tahquitz Rock in Palm Springs. During this period, he met many young climbers from the Sierra Club, such as TM Herbert, Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, Bob Kamps, etc.
Finally, he came to Yosemite, a place with many worth climbing rock walls and the place where Patagonian clothing was originally sold.
doesn't have the right one, then do it yourself
After climbing in Yosemite Park for a period of time, Joynard gradually discovered that the European imported soft rock nails used will get stuck in the rock after being used once, and it usually takes hundreds of rock nails to climb over the rock wall once. This made him want to build his own mountaineering equipment.
It has to be said that Joynard inherited his father's talent in forging (his father has worked as a plasterer, carpenter, electrician and plumber, and is proficient in everything). In 1957, he used a second-hand coal burning forge cooker from the scrap market, as well as some coal tongs and hammers, to start forging rock nails in a small shop next to the chicken house in Burbank's home (the shop was built by his father). The first batch of rock nails came from the chrome-molybdenum alloy steel knives on the harvester (two can be forged within 1 hour). They are not only very hard, but can also be used multiple times.
With them, Joynard and Herbert became the first people to climb to the north of Lost Arrow Chimney and Sentinel Rock. Then more climbers wanted to buy the nails, and he started selling for $1.50 per hand (the European nails at the time were 20 cents per hand). In 1958, Chouinard Equipment was officially established, which was the predecessor of Black Diamond, a world-renowned outdoor equipment manufacturer.
In the next few years, Joynard was busy making equipment for several months every winter, but he would go to various places to climb from April to July: Yusimi Land, Wyoming, Canadian Alps, etc., and did not resume work until it snowed in November.
In 1964, after he returned home, he went straight to the North American Wall on the El Capitan Mountain in the Yousemite Canyon for a 10-day climb. In the fall of the same year, he started to manufacture mountaineering equipment again, and his work location was transferred to a tin shed near the Lockheed Aircraft Factory. There, the first product catalog of Joynard Equipment Company, a page-by-page mimeographed product and price list was born. Interestingly, there was a tough statement at the end of the catalog - don't expect the shipment to be faster from May to November every year (this period is when Joynard climbs)
In the following years, the company adopted more precision dies and machinery, replaced manual labor with assembly line production, and sales doubled every year. By 1970, Joynard Equipment Company became the largest supplier of mountaineering equipment in the United States. However, Joynard doesn't care about the company's revenue and just uses it as the main source of funds for continuing to venture out in the wild.
At Joynard Equipment Company, Joynard has made many top and excellent outdoor equipment: in 1968, the world's first steel front-tooth crampon was launched, and in 1969, the first downward-bent angle crane beak type was cast, which can adapt to climbing various ice and snow terrain. It directly pushed ice climbers to challenge higher ice wall difficulty. In the late 1970s, tubular ice cones were invented, providing mountain friends with safer and faster protection.
Birth of Patagonia
From forging outdoor equipment to making outdoor sportswear, the turning point occurred in a textile factory. After finishing a rock climb in the Peak District National Park in England, Joynard found the world's last machines that still make thick corduroy (the best fabric that prevents clothes from getting worn and scratched before canvas appeared). He then used the machine to make bloomers and shorts in corduroy fabric, and then sold them to Youshimi and became sought after.
Since then, Joynard began to switch to the production of professional outdoor clothing and became bigger and bigger.Initially, the products were traditional Stand Up shorts, rugby shirts and hiking pants. By 1972, the production line began to include Scottish polyurethane-coated cloaks and sleeping bags, Austrian cooked wool gloves, hand-knitted double-sided gloves from Boulder, and some self-designed backpacks (the first backpack for short skiing or hiking trips, etc.). During this period, Joynard and his companions also produced and developed a new raincoat fabric, which was then called "styrofoam lining", a waterproof and breathable fabric similar to Gore-Tex.
After clothing products are becoming more and more popular, Joynard realized that he had to find a name for them. At this time, he thought about the situation of climbing Fitzroy Peak in 1968: due to a storm on the Patagonian Plateau, they hid on the mountain for three weeks. Thinking of this, Joynard hopes that the clothes he produces can withstand the harsh climate of Patagonia. In 1973, Patagonia, a name that can be read in any language, was born, and gradually became famous in North America and even the whole world for the next 30 years.
After the official establishment of Patagonia, Joynard and his companions made many improvements to traditional outdoor clothing and introduced some technologies that have been used today. One of the most representative examples is that Patagonia, through a Norwegian company that produces polypropylene underwear, used this lightweight and non-absorbent fabric in underwear for the first time and proposed the concept of "layering" in its catalog, becoming the first company to educate the outdoor sports community. As a result, they launched a three-layer structure of outdoor clothing: the inner layer absorbs sweat, the middle layer keeps warm, and the outer layer resists wind, sand and moisture erosion.
In addition, Patagonia has also improved the fluff in the underwear to resist the problem of pilling, that is, it has developed a soft bunting fabric, which is a imitation wool material with less pilling, and on this basis, it has also developed a softer and non-pilling double-sided fabric Synchilla.
not only updated the fabric, but Patagonia also replaced all products with new colors in the early 1980s, such as dark blue, duck blue, French red, as well as mango, seafoam and iced brown. You should know that almost all outdoor clothes at that time were tan, forest green or ochre.
These attempts and innovations have been quickly recognized by the market and have also shaped Patagonia's unique style
How to do business if the earth dies
Patagonia's success may make people equate Joynard with successful businessmen, but this is not the case. He believes that running Patagonia is just an experiment, challenging traditional business thinking and model - that is, making profits without destroying nature.
This kind of awe of nature took root in Joynard's heart very early. As early as the age of Joynard Equipment Company, after a climb of the El Capitanos Line, he discovered that the steel nails produced, whether they were inserted or moved, caused irreparable severe damage to the rock. So, he decided to gradually eliminate the rock nail business, which was already a pillar industry at that time.
In 1972, a 14-page article about "Clean Climbing (the concept of low-impact mountaineering that does not cause damage to the rock mass and leaves few human traces)" appeared in the product catalog of Joynard Equipment, showing the harm of rock nails to the environment, and at the same time, it launched an alternative mountaineering wedge (stoppersand and Hexentrics). This tool can be wedged into the cracks of the rock with your hands and will not damage the rock body.
At the beginning, this new advanced mountaineering concept was boycotted. Some people accused Joynard of using rock nails when climbing, but now they in turn asked them to only use small pieces of aluminum nuts. So, in order to prove the feasibility of cleaning mountaineering, Joynard and Bruce Carson used only rock wedges and a few fixed screws and nails without hammers and nails, and flipped over El Capitan via the Nose route. After that, the sales of rock nails gradually shrank, and the rock wedges soon became in short supply.
In the decades since then, Patagonia has continued and carried forward the environmental protection philosophy of Joynard Equipment Company: In 1991, it launched an "Environmental Review" program that checks all manufacturing processes, clothing, fibers and dyes to regulate the contradiction between business growth and manufacturing industry's environmental damage. The results show that the cotton fiber used in the fabric uses a large amount of various insecticides and leaf decidants, which is extremely harmful to the environment and the human body and can cause the incidence of breast cancer. Therefore, Patagonia made the decision to replace all cotton fabrics with organic cotton within 18 months;
Starting in 2012, it will transparent all supplier information and accept salesperson supervision of its environmental protection;
In 2005, it started the Common Threads Garment Recycling Program, that is, every shirt sold to consumers can be returned to the company when it is not worn, and it will be recycled.
Joynard positioned the company's corporate culture as "the first on the earth and the second on profit". His explanation for this is very direct. The earth is dead, so what else can I do in business. This different business philosophy also runs through all aspects of the company. For example, the Patagonia building relies on solar panels to supply power; for 6 months every year, Joynard will not be in the office, but will climb, surf or fish around the world; the reception staff at the company headquarters will take a regular three-month vacation in summer to teach surfing at the beach; as long as the weather is good, employees can go out for a run or surfing, and can also play volleyball on the sand pit behind the company building. In addition, the company will sponsor skiing and mountaineering trips.
All this is because Joynard believes that those flexible and capable employees know exactly how to adjust the pace of the day, and that every experience of outdoor exercise can also be fed back to product improvements. Perhaps, this is also the secret of Patagonia's call the coolest company in the world.
