Yvon Chouinard

Yvon Chouinard was raised in a French Canadian family; his father was a blacksmith. In the 1950s the family relocated to Southern California with little English and limited means. As a teenager, Chouinard found his footing in the mountains, and by his early twenties he was regarded as one of the finest climbers in America, completing first ascents on some of the country's most demanding faces. Dissatisfied with the available equipment, he began forging his own climbing tools — better made and cheaper than what existed — and selling them to fellow climbers who sought more.

That informal trade became Patagonia, Inc., one of the most closely watched companies in American business. Chouinard built it around a principle he refused to separate from commerce: that a company's relationship to the natural world cannot be cordoned off from its products and profits. Patagonia began making fleece from recycled plastic bottles and committed at least one per cent of annual revenue to environmental causes. Sales eventually exceeded $250 million a year — evidence, in Chouinard's framing, that an uncompromising environmental stance and commercial success were not in opposition.

Chouinard has continued both climbing and surfing. Let My People Go Surfing — his combined memoir and manifesto — set down the philosophy behind Patagonia's approach to design, production, and environmental accountability, becoming a reference point in discussions about purpose-driven business. The company he shaped over four decades continues to operate on the principles he established: using commercial activity as a sustained vehicle for environmental advocacy, directing profits towards the causes that informed its founding and have governed it since.