“Earth is now our only shareholder,” the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard wrote in his announcement letter, “If we have any hope of a thriving planet — much less a business — it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have.”
Such announcement is quite rare in the fast and competitive world of business. Yet, the apparel manufacturing giant Patagonia founder proudly donated the entire company’s profits to fight the uphill battle against climate crisis.
It should be noted that Patagonia is worth $3 billion as per The New York Times.
Patagonia was already known for their remarkable efforts fighting off climate crisis and GreenCitizen recognizes them as one of the greenest companies.
The company used donate 1% of the company’s profit for environmental causes. Even, back in 2018, Patagonia changed the company purpose — We’re in business to save our home planet.
Despite doing so much for the nature, Chouinard felt that he’s not doing enough! He could see only two probable options ahead of him, either sell the company and donate the lump sum, or take the company public.
Chouinard didn’t like either of the options and took a decision that is unprecedented in today’s world.
Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.
Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.” Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.
From now on the company’s stocks will be manages by two entities — Patagonia Purpose Trust and Holdfast Collective. The Patagonia Purpose Trust will get the voting stocks and will aim to protect company’s core values. The Holdfast Collective, the nonprofit that is fighting environmental crisis and defending nature, will get the non-voting stock that is worth $3 billion.