Yvon Chouinard
Yvon Chouinard
Yvon Chouinard is a rock climber, environmentalist and outdoor industry businessman. His company, Patagonia, is known for its environmental focus...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth9 November 1938
CountryUnited States of America
Yvon Chouinard quotes about
nature long lasts
Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.
sports adventure climbing
Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It's the same with surfing.
spiritual climbing purpose
The whole purpose of climbing something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain. But if you compromise the process you’re an asshole when you start out and an asshole when you get back.
pain extinction empires
There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.
sports successful clothes
I've always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession that doesn't appeal to me. Once I reach 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product like - and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.
business creating people
We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they're frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we're already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we're not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you're making products that people don't need, you're at the mercy of the economy, you're at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation.
hero water important
The most important thing is to get the fish in quickly and leave it in the water. Forget the hero pose.
adventure
True adventure begins when everything goes wrong.
goal patagonia profit
At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.
dream growing-up hero
No young kid growing up dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete or a forest ranger The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welchs of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values.
business real roaming-around
I took a dozen of our top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wild lands, we asked ourselves why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted Patagonia to be. A billion-dollar company? Okay, but not if it meant we had to make products we couldn't be proud of. And we discussed what we could do to help stem the environmental harm we caused as a company. We talked about the values we had in common, and the shared culture that had brought everyone to Patagonia, Inc., and not another company.
running business years
But I'm really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That's what's important.
business growth resources
So all of these companies that are going for the big growth, if it continues for any length of time, will outlast their resources and outlast their customers and go belly-up. And that's why these huge companies have massive layoffs all the time.
adventure patagonia overused
The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong - that's when adventure starts