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In 1990, Patagonia made a donation to Planned Parenthood, angering Christian fundamentalists. The response was swift: calls for a boycott, threats of store pickets and a deluge of complaints to its call center that jammed its phone lines.
The Ventura-based outdoor apparel retailer could have tried to placate the protesters. Instead, the company directed customer service representatives to respond: “Thank you so much for sharing your views. We want you to know that for every call like this we receive, we’re donating an additional $5 to Planned Parenthood.”
“The calls stopped pretty soon,” recalled Vincent Stanley, Patagonia’s director of philosophy.
And the sales, as usual, kept chugging along.
Politics has always been a minefield for businesses. But it used to be one they could avoid.
Three decades ago, it was all but unheard of for a major consumer brand to stake out a position on a hot-button culture war issue. Today, they’re increasingly finding such positions thrust on them by societal upheavals too big to simply ignore and activist customer bases demanding expressions of solidarity and meaningful action.
The rise of “conscious capitalism” has bred in younger consumers, particularly, an expectation that the companies seeking their dollars should share their values. Meanwhile, the hyper-partisan polarization of everything from sneakers to coffee means even “safe” causes can turn controversial in an instant, and silence is no refuge, with companies that avoid engaging on social issues apt to be tagged as complicit.
It’s all a little daunting for companies hoping to make sales, not headlines.
“The problem right now is you have businesses that are afraid,” said Marc Elias, a voting rights lawyer who works with Patagonia and other companies on their activism efforts. The instinct of most corporate leaders is to seek safety by staying with the herd and issuing only the blandest possible statements, he said. “It’s really unfortunate, because now is not the time for businesses to offer thoughts and prayers.”
The history of Patagonia suggests such risk aversion is unnecessary, if not outright counterproductive. The company has managed to pull off a high-wire act mixing business with activism throughout its 48-year history, its core business selling outdoor clothing seemingly bolstered by its progressive attitude and, at times, antics.
The retailer figured out a key lesson early: For all the corporate hand-wringing about losing customers, boycott threats are often limited to just that. If you make products that consumers want to buy, your brand can function as a political platform with little risk to the bottom line, brand strategists say. Even the free publicity of a backlash can be advantageous.
“People often ask, ‘Are you a for-profit business or are you an NGO?’” Patagonia Chief Executive Ryan Gellert said. “And the answer in my mind is yes; I think we’re some weird mashup of those two things. What we really are is a for-profit business, and we use the business to try to influence larger, more systemic issues.”
Boycotts, he said, are “just not something we think about.”
In the past, Patagonia’s advocacy was primarily focused on environmental causes. In 1985, it began donating 10% of its profit to conservation groups, which it later changed to 1% of all revenue. It sued President Trump after he announced plans to shrink national monuments in Utah. To discourage unnecessary consumerism, it has run ads asking people not to buy its products and is scaling back its lucrative business selling third-party logo gear to corporate clients (a move widely interpreted as Patagonia trying to distance itself from the banking and tech firms that love to slap their names on its fleece vests and puffy jackets).
But in a supercharged political environment, Patagonia has widened its scope. It pulled its ads off Facebook last year, citing the social media giant’s “spread of hateful lies and dangerous propaganda.” That was followed by a “Vote the Assholes Out” tag sewn into a line of men’s and women’s shorts ahead of the presidential election. A few weeks ago, the company donated $1 million to fight restrictive voting laws in Georgia.
The donation — along with an open letter by Gellert in which he pushed other CEOs to step up and “do more than make a corporate statement” — riled conservatives. Some called for a boycott on Twitter and told the retailer to stay out of politics. “You’ve decided to get woke so now you can go broke. So I guess it’s #boycottpatagonia time,” read one tweet.
Going broke doesn’t appear to be much of a risk at the moment. Executives at Patagonia, which is privately held with reported revenue of more than $1 billion annually, say there has never been a material sales decline when it has dabbled in contentious issues. It operates 36 stores in 19 states and Washington, D.C., and sells its products at more than 2,000 retailers worldwide.
“It’s worth losing a few customers — we always gain more when we take one of these positions,” spokesperson Corley Kenna said. Plus, a tweet pledging to boycott doesn’t automatically equal a lost sale: “Everyone says they’re a customer, but the truth is, if we had all of those customers, we’d be a lot bigger.”
