As the crowd of 600 or so Patagonia employees gathered on the morning of September 14, they had an inkling that something big was coming. If the all-day hold placed on their calendars hadn’t clued them in, what they found in the courtyard of their office in Ventura, California, did: a fleet of food trucks; big displays charting the company’s milestones; a smattering of alums, some of whom dated to Patagonia’s founding in 1973; a new stage with Patagonia signage; and video cameras beaming the event to the rest of their 3,500 colleagues.
As a giant screen came to life, the crowd cheered a rousing cold open from Trevor Noah, followed by a video of the company’s leaders that erased any doubt about the enormity of the moment.
“None of us have been able to talk about this,” Patagonia board member Kris Tompkins, also the company’s first CEO, began. “I believe this is tectonic.” Patagonia president Jenna Johnson put it more plainly: “We’re here to talk about a really big fucking deal.” The company’s deputy general counsel, Greg Curtis, followed her, adding, “This whole situation is incredibly humbling.” Next came Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert: “I think what the Chouinards have committed to doing, and what we’ve all been able to create here, is one of the bigger moments, honestly, in the history of capitalism.”
Then the company’s iconoclastic founder, Yvon Chouinard, appeared onscreen, sitting on a folding chair in the woods wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Neither his weathered face nor untamed eyebrows betrayed any emotion as he spoke. “Well, I had the same thing for breakfast I always do,” Chouinard, now 84, said. “Everybody else around me is making a big deal out of it, but for me, it’s just another day.”
Except that morning, after his usual bowl of 10-grain cereal topped with fruit, Chouinard had come here to announce that he was handing over ownership of one of the most admired and imitated companies of the past few decades. Valued at around $3 billion and known for its
