Patagonia: Leader in Fashion Sustainability for The Planet
Paul Butland March 16, 2025
As one of the leading pioneers in the outdoor and adventure clothing industry, Patagonia continues to create sustainable, environmentally friendly apparel while leading the charge in activism against climate change. We are dedicated to providing inclusive and safe working conditions and producing safe, environmentally friendly outdoor clothing aimed at supporting environmental causes.
This spring, we are hosting a “1% for The Planet” event that celebrates a more sustainable future while promoting our unique line of outdoor and adventure clothing. Our Sustainability Report for 2023/2024 outlines our commitment to the planet and our status as a Certified B Corporation, highlighting our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiative. Patagonia is proud to share these statistics and to remain a significant contributor to the global fashion industry.
We are taking steps to ensure our clothing aligns with global environmentally sustainable practices in our stores and is produced under safe, controlled, and humane working conditions for our employees. Additionally, we continue to collaborate with non-profit organizations that support environmental causes. This blog will detail the specific steps we have taken to promote environmental conservation and activism, reinforcing our position as a leader in the global fashion industry.
At Patagonia, we provide an inclusive, safe, and humane environment for our workers while creating environmentally sustainable clothing for the planet. Recently, Yvon Chuinard, Owner and founder of Patagonia, who has been with the company since 1973, remains dedicated to making products sustainably, treating employees well, and engaging in corporate responsibility. As the owner, he continues to be an advocate for environmental causes to ensure the organization’s workplace is a safe, inclusive and humane space for employees while continuing to work with environmental non-profit companies and climate change activists. As he states, “We started with our products, using materials that caused less harm to the environment. We gave away 1% of sales each year. We became a certified B Corp and a California benefit corporation, writing our values into our corporate charter so they would be preserved. More recently, in 2018, we changed the company’s purpose to: We’re in business to save our home planet. While we’re doing our best to address the environmental crisis, it’s not enough. We needed to find a way to put more money into fighting the crisis while keeping the company’s values intact.”
What motivates Yvon and other Patagonia employees to keep speaking out against climate change and keep producing environmentally sustainable clothing boils down to our five core values: 1) Quality, 2) Integrity, 3) Environmentalism, 4) Justice, and 5) Not bound by convention. Other outdoor fashion companies look to us for inspiration and see us as a leader in the global fight against climate change. Dean Carter, Vice President of Human Resources and Shared Services at Patagonia states, “Not only do we need to make more progress on how we include and bring more historically underrepresented groups in to Patagonia, we need to do it in a way that broadens who we experience wild places with and builds a more representative community of stewards who will keep those places protected for the generations to come.” Patagonia’s mission is to be a global leader in the fight against climate change and continue to produce environmentally sustainable clothing for years to come; we have inspired and collaborated with non-profit organizations to promote environmental causes while engaging in corporate responsibility practices like the “1% for The Planet” event to better help people understand the social and environmental effects of industries such as Patagonia.