{"id":1710,"date":"2025-03-15T07:51:27","date_gmt":"2025-03-15T07:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/15\/patagonia-nonprofit-head-explains-why-its-owner-gave-away-the-company\/"},"modified":"2025-03-15T07:51:31","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T07:51:31","slug":"patagonia-nonprofit-head-explains-why-its-owner-gave-away-the-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/15\/patagonia-nonprofit-head-explains-why-its-owner-gave-away-the-company\/","title":{"rendered":"Patagonia Nonprofit Head Explains Why Its Owner Gave Away the Company"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Patagonia Founder Yvon Chouinard speaks onstage during the Tribeca X: A Day of Conversations Celebrating the Intersection of Entertainment and Advertising in 2019 in New York City. Ben Gabbe\/Getty Images for Tribeca X<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Greg Curtis<\/a> first heard of a \u201cpurpose trust\u201d back in 2017, when he was working as Patagonia<\/a>\u2019s assistant general counsel and keeping an eye out for company structures that might interest the company\u2019s founder, Yvon Chouinard<\/a>. \u201cWe were always looking for options for Yvon\u2019s curiosity about what happens next when he\u2019s not with us anymore,\u201d said Curtis, who now heads Patagonia\u2019s nonprofit arm, while speaking at SXSW on March 11.<\/p>\n

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By 2020, Chouinard\u2019s discomfort with his ownership of the lucrative outdoor apparel brand was ramping up. While Patagonia has long used recycled materials and donated to environmental causes, Chouinard\u2014an avid rock climber and surfer who founded the company in the 1970s\u2014wanted to do more.<\/p>\n

Curtis and his coworkers began searching for a solution. Bringing in minority investors, employee stock options, selling the company, and even going public were considered. \u201cWe had this soup going of different ideas,\u201d said Curtis, who noted that Chouinard and his family had \u201cbeen struggling of what do with the business for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, they landed on the concept of a purpose trust. Unlike traditional trusts, purpose trusts are\u2014as their names might suggest\u2014created to serve a specific purpose and not a named beneficiary.<\/p>\n

Instead of selling Patagonia or bequeathing it to his heirs, Chouinard in 2022 effectively gave it away to protect Earth, which he described as the company\u2019s \u201conly shareholder\u201d in an open letter at the time. The family transferred its voting shares, around 2 percent of its stock, to the Patagonia Purpose Trust to protect the company\u2019s values. The remaining 98 percent of non-voting stock was given to the Holdfast Collective, an entity headed by Curtis that oversees five environmentally focused nonprofits and receives all profits from Patagonia that aren\u2019t reinvested into the business.<\/p>\n

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Greg Curtis is executive director of the Holdfast Collective. Courtesy Patagonia<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Purpose trusts are popular in Europe<\/h3>\n

Patagonia isn\u2019t the first corporate company to pursue this purpose-driven model, but it\u2019s one of the most noticeable examples in the U.S. The concept is much more visible across Europe, as evidenced by companies like the Danish brewer Carlsberg, which has been owned by the Carlsberg Foundation since 1887. The luxury Swiss watchmaker Rolex<\/a>, too, has been owned and operated by the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation for decades, while Denmark\u2019s drug maker Novo Nordisk<\/a> also boasts this type of steward-ownership model.<\/p>\n

Holdfast Collective is already making good on its promise to defend the environment. Two years in, more than $100 million has been invested in nature conservation, said Curtis. \u201cThere has been a lot of project work in terms of programs, litigation, political climate leaders and actual landscapes protected,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Last February, for example, the organization gave a staggering $5.2 million<\/a> to the Nature Conservancy, a global conservation group, to help with its acquisition of nearly 8,000 acres of land in Clarke County, Ala. And last September, it offered $1 million to the nonprofit Rodale Institute to support underserved farmers across Ventura County, Calif. \u201cWe\u2019re excited to get a few more years into it and have more of a track record,\u201d said Curtis, who noted that Patagonia is still in the early days of its unusual corporate structure.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are totally thinking about it like an experiment,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re building the wings of the plane as we fly it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Patagonia<\/p><\/div>\n