The Size of the Company 'Given Away' to Save the Planet

In an announcement made on Wednesday, the founder of the clothing company Patagonia, Inc., Yvon Chouinard, said that his company was being given away to help fight the climate crisis, saying: "All profits, in perpetuity, will go to our mission to ‘save our home planet’". The private company, founded in 1973 in California, has been transferred to a uniquely structured trust and nonprofit, meaning, as Chouinard proclaimed: “As of now, Earth is our only shareholder”.

While profit figures for the company are not publicly available, Statista Company DB estimates of Patagonia's global annual revenue give a good indicator of the size of the retailer. As this infographic shows, despite declining y-o-y since 2019, Patagonia has seen annual sales of over $1 billion for the last three years.

Having donated 2 percent of all stock and all decision-making authority to a trust, the Chouinard family has transferred the other 98 percent to a nonprofit called the Holdfast Collective, which “will use every dollar received to fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities, as quickly as possible". Explaining the thinking behind the move, Chouinard said: “Instead of ‘going public’, you could say we’re ‘going purpose’...Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.”