What Patagonia’s Piton Problem Teaches About Brand Values

The product was the steel piton. Climbers hammered it into a crack, clipped in, and the last climber on the rope hammered it out again. Route by route, season by season, the hammering left the cracks of Yosemite chipped and widened. By 1970 Chouinard Equipment was the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States, and the damage was coming from the thing it sold. ¹

Chouinard and Tom Frost could see it on the walls they loved. So they decided to minimise the piton business and pushed climbers towards an alternative. Their 1972 catalogue opened with an argument for “clean climbing” and promoted aluminium chocks that could be placed by hand and removed without a hammer, with an essay explaining how to climb with them. ^{1 2}

Chouinard Equipment was the climbing business that came before Patagonia. The decision set the pattern the clothing company would later become known for. A company found harm built into its own product and changed what it asked customers to buy, at a risk to itself.

That is what a brand value looks like when it works. It changes a decision. The useful question for a founder is what the business would do differently because of the values it claims. The words on the About page follow from that.

Start with the choice your company finds difficult

Integrity, quality and sustainability can all describe a serious commitment. On their own they reveal little about how a company behaves. Most leadership teams would sign up to all three, including teams that make very different decisions.

The difference shows when priorities compete.

A materials company wants to promise a delivery date before its production schedule is reliable. A monitoring business wants to describe an early signal as a verified outcome. A studio is offered a profitable project whose claims it cannot defend. Each time there is a commercial reason to move quickly and a principle that might point another way.

A value starts to mean something in those moments. It guides the choice, marks a boundary and gives someone a reason they can explain to colleagues.

Purpose and values work at different levels. Purpose names why the organisation exists. Values set the standards for pursuing it. A company can hold a worthwhile purpose and still make choices that undermine it, which is why the standards need to be written down.

Give the value a visible expression

Patagonia’s published account of quality includes whether a product lasts, can be repaired and can eventually be recycled. People can examine those things. Its account of integrity includes owning mistakes and meeting commitments. People can question those behaviours. ³

The work is to move from an attractive word to a practice someone would recognise.

For a science company, integrity might mean publishing the conditions behind a performance result, even when the headline becomes less impressive. Quality might mean fixing a recurring installation problem before adding a new feature. Respect might mean letting affected communities shape a project while the important choices are still open.

These are suggestions for how a value could show up. Each company has to decide what it can commit to, then give the right people the authority and resources to follow through. A sentence on the website cannot make that decision for them.

We saw a small version of this in our work with Fair Carbon, an organisation building a market for blue carbon. Its leadership wanted the new brand to keep a feminine character that mattered to the organisation’s culture, and to stay open to everyone it works with. The team also wanted continuity with an identity people already recognised. Those commitments set the design brief. We evolved the existing visual language and kept a relationship with the original mark, and the new brand was built inside those limits.

A campaign can make the tension visible

On Black Friday in 2011, Patagonia ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times headed “Don’t Buy This Jacket”. The text set out the water, carbon and waste behind one of its own best-selling products and asked readers to think before buying. ⁴

The advert worked because the cost was attached to something the company sold. A broad worry about consumption became a specific purchase a reader could picture.

That gave the message a product, a tension and a request. It also left the company open to a fair challenge about how continued growth fits with asking customers to buy less. A values-led campaign should be able to stand that kind of question. Its credibility comes from what the organisation does around the message, in product design, in repair and in how it responds when practice falls short.

For a climate company, the equivalent will usually be quieter. It could be a clearly stated limitation on a product page, a repair commitment, or a sales presentation that says when the technology is the wrong fit. The communication stands out because the choice underneath it is specific.

Put the commitment where future decisions happen

In 2022 the Chouinard family transferred ownership of Patagonia to two entities. The Patagonia Purpose Trust holds all the voting stock, which is 2% of the total stock. The Holdfast Collective holds the other 98% as non-voting shares. Patagonia says the profit left after reinvestment in the business goes to the Collective to fund environmental work. ⁵

The arrangement gives the purpose a place in who controls the company and where its returns go. It is worth describing precisely. The commitment covers profit after reinvestment, which is a long way from every pound of revenue.

Most founders will choose a different structure. The question that transfers is where a commitment becomes part of how the business runs.

A value that depends on a founder remembering to step in is fragile once the company grows. Approval criteria, responsibilities, budgets and incentives let other people act on the same standard.

A promise to make responsible claims needs an owner for the evidence behind them. A promise to support customers after installation needs a service budget and a process for handling problems. A value is easier to trust when the organisation can show how it is kept.

Develop your own values from decisions you recognise

Start with the past year of work. Find a decision the team is proud of, one that caused disagreement and one it would handle differently now. Talk through what mattered in each case and what the decision cost in time, money or opportunity.

Then turn each proposed value into a working commitment. The examples below are illustrations for climate and science companies. They are not Patagonia’s policies.

Proposed value	What it could change	Evidence the team could inspect
We make claims we can defend	A forecast stays labelled as a forecast, including in sales material	A claim register showing sources, conditions and review dates
We respect the people affected by our work	Project choices stay open while affected people give input	A record of what changed in response to that input
We build for use over time	Handover, maintenance and support are part of the delivery plan	Working documentation, a named owner and an agreed support process

The wording should follow the decisions. If the team cannot say what a value changes, spend longer on its meaning before polishing the sentence.

Next, test it against an attractive opportunity. Ask whether the commitment would still hold if it delayed revenue, forced rework or ruled out a client. Sometimes the answer exposes a boundary the team has not yet agreed. That disagreement is useful, because it is the strategic work the value exists to contain.

Record the trade-off behind each decision

Before you draft a value, write a fuller record of each decision from the past year. The middle column is a worked example from the piton story, drawn from Patagonia’s company history and the 1972 catalogue. Fill in the last column for each of your three decisions.

Question	Chouinard Equipment, 1970 to 1972	Your decision
Decision faced	Its steel pitons were damaging the rock on popular climbs	Name the choice and when the team faced it
Alternatives	Keep pitons at the centre of the range, or minimise the piton business and promote aluminium chocks placed by hand	List each option the team seriously considered
Trade-off accepted	Patagonia later described the chock launch as “a big risk”	State what the team gave up or put at risk
Evidence	The catalogue reported cracks on popular Yosemite routes “degenerating into series of piton holes”	Note what the team knew at the time and where it came from
What changed in operations	The catalogue made the case for clean climbing and carried a 14-page essay on using chocks. Within months, chocks “sold faster than they could be made”	Record the product, process, budget or role that changed

Read the trade-off row first. It shows what the team was willing to give up, and a value is easiest to see there. Then take the completed records to the table above and draft each value from what the decisions share.

Leave room for scrutiny

Patagonia is a useful example and an imperfect one. Its own account of the jacket campaign acknowledges that making any product consumes resources. A commitment can be serious while its execution is still incomplete.

Companies need language for that. Say what the standard is, where current practice meets it and what still has to change. A value becomes believable when people can see how the organisation handles a failure as well as a success.

Copying a celebrated brand brings its vocabulary without the history that made it credible. Your company has its own products, constraints, customers and responsibilities, and its values should help it decide within that world.

The piton story leaves one test worth keeping. When the evidence shows a conflict between what your company sells and what it stands for, watch what happens next. That is where a brand starts to earn its words.

If you are developing your company’s values, bring the decisions your team keeps struggling to make. Brighter Future’s brand strategy work connects purpose and principles to positioning, behaviour and the way the company presents itself.

Sources and further reading

1. Patagonia, Company History
2. Patagonia, Clean Climbing and the 1972 Chouinard Equipment catalogue
3. Patagonia, Our Core Values
4. Patagonia, Don’t Buy This Jacket, Black Friday and The New York Times, 25 November 2011
5. Patagonia, Ownership, 14 September 2022
6. Patagonia Australia, Company History
7. Patagonia Works, Patagonia’s Next Chapter, Earth Is Now Our Only Shareholder, press release, 14 September 2022
8. Yvon Chouinard and Tom Frost, A Word, Chouinard Equipment catalogue, 1972, scan and transcription at climbaz.com
9. Galen A. Rowell, review of the Chouinard Equipment catalogue, American Alpine Journal, 1973
10. Marc Gunther, Patagonia’s Conscientious Response to Black Friday Consumer Madness, GreenBiz, 28 November 2011, with the full advert text
11. Patagonia Hong Kong, Our Mission and Core Values

First published 27 March 2024, revised and restored at its original address.