Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when youโre right on the edge, but you donโt go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to โhave it all,โ the sooner it will die.
Yvon ChouinardYou have a whole life in the outdoors, you realize you have a sense of responsibility to protect these wild places.
Yvon ChouinardI drive old cars, all my Patagonia clothes are years and years old, I hardly have anything new. I try to lead a very simple life. I am not a consumer of anything. And I much prefer sleeping on somebody's floor than in a motel room.
Yvon ChouinardI purposely try to hire people who are really self-motivated and good at what they do, and then I just leave them alone.
Yvon ChouinardWhat they don't realize is that I'm not in the business to make clothes. I'm not in the business to make more money for myself, for Christ's sake. This is the reason Patagonia exists - to put into action the recommendations I read about in books to avoid environmental collapse. That's the reason I'm in business - to try to clean up our own act, and try to influence other companies to do the right thing, and try to influence our customers to do the right thing. So we're not going to change.
Yvon Chouinard