Patagonia Founder Is Giving His Company Away in Pledge to Fight Climate Change
Yvon Chouinard says nearly 50-year-old outdoor clothing brand will be owned by trust and nonprofit, rather than sell or go public
2 min
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard is giving away the multibillion-dollar outdoor apparel business he founded nearly 50 years ago, with a goal of helping to tackle climate change.
Mr. Chouinard and his family have transferred their ownership of Patagonia to a trust and a nonprofit organisation as opposed to taking the privately held company public or selling it, the 83-year-old founder said in a letter Wednesday, titled “Earth is now our only shareholder.”
“It’s been nearly 50 years since we began our experiment in responsible business, and we are just getting started,” said Mr. Chouinard, a world-class mountain climber who started importing rugby shirts and other apparel in the 1970s for his friends to wear. “If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a thriving business—50 years from now, it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have. This is another way we’ve found to do our part.”
Patagonia, based in Ventura, Calif., didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company made a name for itself selling fleece jackets, board shorts and plaid shirts. The fleece vests in particular have developed a cult following from people who work in finance, while the company’s environmental- and social-conscious practices have earned dedicated buyers in other consumer spheres. Patagonia had annual revenue of $1 billion from 2017 to 2020.
Patagonia will remain a for-profit business under the new arrangement and will continue to be run by chief executive Ryan Gellert, Mr. Chouinard said. The company will also continue donating 1% of its sales to environmental nonprofit groups, he said.
The trust, called the Patagonia Purpose Trust, owns 2% of the company and all of the voting stock. It will be tasked with protecting Patagonia’s existing values and independence, Mr. Chouinard said. The nonprofit organisation, called the Holdfast Collective, owns 98% of the company and all the nonvoting stock, which doesn’t give it decision-making authority. It will be charged with taking the profits generated by Patagonia and using those funds to address climate change.
Patagonia said in a statement that it expects to pay out roughly $100 million a year to Holdfast Collective, depending on the health of the business.
Stacy Palmer, who has been editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy since it was founded in 1988, said it was the first she has heard of an arrangement such as this.
“As far as I know, this is extraordinarily different than what others have done because of Patagonia’s size and profitability,” Ms. Palmer said.
She noted that Holdfast Collective is a 501(c)(4) not-for-profit organisation, which allows it to use the money to advocate for causes and political candidates, not just to give to charities.
“This means that the money is intended to shape policy and politics, more than, say, supporting a charity that does river cleanup,” Ms. Palmer said. “That’s a lot of money pouring into advocacy and could be very powerful.”
Mr. Chouinard has said that he approaches leading his company as a sort of a road map for aspiring business owners.
“I never even wanted to be in business,” he said in a 2012 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “But I hang onto Patagonia because it’s my resource to do something good. It’s a way to demonstrate that corporations can lead examined lives.”
The Chouinard family will oversee leadership of the Patagonia Purpose Trust and will spearhead the philanthropic work of the Holdfast Collective. The family will also remain member of Patagonia’s board of directors.
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The 28% increase buoyed the country as it battled on several fronts but investment remains down from 2021
3 min
As the war against Hamas dragged into 2024, there were worries here that investment would dry up in Israel’s globally important technology sector, as much of the world became angry against the casualties in Gaza and recoiled at the unstable security situation.
In fact, a new survey found investment into Israeli technology startups grew 28% last year to $10.6 billion. The influx buoyed Israel’s economy and helped it maintain a war footing on several battlefronts.
The increase marks a turnaround for Israeli startups, which had experienced a decline in investments in 2023 to $8.3 billion, a drop blamed in part on an effort to overhaul the country’s judicial system and the initial shock of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
Tech investment in Israel remains depressed from years past. It is still just a third of the almost $30 billion in private investments raised in 2021, a peak after which Israel followed the U.S. into a funding market downturn.
Any increase in Israeli technology investment defied expectations though. The sector is responsible for 20% of Israel’s gross domestic product and about 10% of employment. It contributed directly to 2.2% of GDP growth in the first three quarters of the year, according to Startup Nation Central—without which Israel would have been on a negative growth trend, it said.
“If you asked me a year before if I expected those numbers, I wouldn’t have,” said Avi Hasson, head of Startup Nation Central, the Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that tracks tech investments and released the investment survey.
Israel’s tech sector is among the world’s largest technology hubs, especially for startups. It has remained one of the most stable parts of the Israeli economy during the 15-month long war, which has taxed the economy and slashed expectations for growth to a mere 0.5% in 2024.
Industry investors and analysts say the war stifled what could have been even stronger growth. The survey didn’t break out how much of 2024’s investment came from foreign sources and local funders.
“We have an extremely innovative and dynamic high tech sector which is still holding on,” said Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank. “It has recovered somewhat since the start of the war, but not as much as one would hope.”
At the war’s outset, tens of thousands of Israel’s nearly 400,000 tech employees were called into reserve service and companies scrambled to realign operations as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon pounded the country. Even as operations normalized, foreign airlines overwhelmingly cut service to Israel, spooking investors and making it harder for Israelis to reach their customers abroad.
An explosion in negative global sentiment toward Israel introduced a new form of risk in doing business with Israeli companies. Global ratings firms lowered Israel’s credit rating over uncertainty caused by the war.
Israel’s government flooded money into the economy to stabilize it shortly after war broke out in October 2023. That expansionary fiscal policy, economists say, stemmed what was an initial economic contraction in the war’s first quarter and helped Israel regain its footing, but is now resulting in expected tax increases to foot the bill.
The 2024 boost was led by investments into Israeli cybersecurity companies, which captured about 40% of all private capital raised, despite representing only 7% of Israeli tech companies. Many of Israel’s tech workers have served in advanced military-technology units, where they can gain experience building products. Israeli tech products are sometimes tested on the battlefield. These factors have led to its cybersecurity companies being dominant in the global market, industry experts said.
The number of Israeli defense-tech companies active throughout 2024 doubled, although they contributed to a much smaller percentage of the overall growth in investments. This included some startups which pivoted to the area amid a surge in global demand spurred by the war in Ukraine and at home in Israel. Funding raised by Israeli defense-tech companies grew to $165 million in 2024, from $19 million the previous year.
“The fact that things are literally battlefield proven, and both the understanding of the customer as well as the ability to put it into use and to accelerate the progress of those technologies, is something that is unique to Israel,” said Hasson.
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