I was thinking about the importance of passion and fun when it comes to the effort of innovating today. My interview with Rob Bon Durant, the VP of Marketing, from Patagonia for Spark really captured the power of fun.
Have More Fun
I’ve had a couple of different roles in the company. I have a marketing background and was the marketing director for five years and then switched over to the sales and brand development side. Previously my responsibilities primarily revolved around brand marketing and product marketing, and I worked with our design and development teams on both the product and collateral marketing sides to develop brand messaging and do research and development for line building.
If you look at Patagonia, we have a variety of different sales channels. It’s a pretty unique opportunity because we sell online, we have our catalogue and mail order business, we have our own direct retail stores, and then we have a very robust wholesale business.
Open and Fun Environment
As far as our physical environment goes, Patagonia has no offices. We have office buildings but we have no doors that close except for the conference rooms. Basically, what you’re dealing with is an open and very sharing environment, which encourages communication – maybe sometimes too much – but it absolutely fosters that type of interaction.
The overall theme of the office, that it’s very open and fun, happens in a variety of different ways. When you call Patagonia and the machine picks up, it says, “Thanks for calling Patagonia. We’re usually open if the surf’s not up.” So it’s very much a ‘Let my people surf’ philosophy. That’s the philosophy that Yvon established thirty-five years ago when he founded Chouinard Equipment. We were not business people before we came here.
We were pretty much climbers and surfers and skiers that found our way through serendipity or otherwise to Patagonia – because Patagonia was an extension of the lifestyle that we all supported and lived. We have a boardroom here, but it’s not a typical boardroom – it’s actually a board room, filled with surfboards. We have communal bikes with board racks attached that can be taken down to Surfer’s Point.
We’re very much living on the fly in terms of professional versus personal endeavors – but I want to reiterate that we do cover for each other – the work gets done, but it doesn’t necessarily get done on a nine to five time table. We’re very nontraditional in that aspect. That in and of itself makes the work environment very unique and very dynamic – if we wind up staying until 7:00 pm it’s probably because we took a two-hour lunch because there was a big swell coming in.
Lead, Don’t Follow
I can’t remember what the statistics are, but we get something like thirty thousand applications a year for an average of thirty positions. We don’t tend to hire industry professionals or MBAs. It’s been a firmly held belief here that it’s easier to teach a fun hog to be a businessman than to teach a businessman how to be a fun hog. It’s always been the philosophy that we supported, and if we have had to do that extra work, we do it willingly because it improves the quality of our professional life. There is no place like Patagonia that I’ve really run across, especially for a quarter billion dollar company – a company this size that can maintain this sort of corporate culture and still stay in the black year after year.
I think much of our success comes from the fact that we clearly understand and know the product that we sell – we live it. When we start our design cycle each season we don’t start it in a boardroom, we don’t start it in a conference room under fluorescent lights. We start it in Hawaii if we’re designing for the spring; we start it in Colorado or Alaska if we’re designing for the winter, and we usually go pretty deep into the backcountry to start that process. We drag everything with us that we’ve made over the last year. We bring our athletes – our ambassadors – out with us and we talk about the product. We ski in it, we climb in it, we rough it up and figure out what’s wrong and what needs to be improved and what’s perfect. So we come back with a very clear and rich understanding of what it is that we’re up to.
Play and Work Together
Most of us are very close; we have a tendency to work together and play together. My closest friends sit a few feet away from me, and I’m with them all the time – on Fridays we hit the road at four o’clock to spend the weekend climbing or skiing. If we’re going skiing for the weekend because of the company that we are, because we supply so many outdoor professionals, I might call a ski patroller and say, “I’m coming up for the weekend” and go out and sweep with them in the morning.
Basically what you’re getting is sort of this continuation of a lifestyle that’s both professional and personal. When I go out skiing with a patroller, it helps me professionally because I’m experiencing what they experience – I’m seeing firsthand the challenges that they put their clothes through and I’m taking that information back and going, ‘Okay, we need more durability on the knees’ or, ‘We need to extend a zipper three inches so it can fit a communication device more appropriately.’ And all of this happens via the relationship itself – it’s not a questionnaire, it’s not an online survey; it’s very much hands-on, experiential contact.
I think for us the end of the workday on Friday is the opportunity to really go out and live the lifestyle that we’re building professionally during the week. For me, heading out on Friday with a bag full of samples to go climbing is probably the most exciting way I can think of to start a weekend. That may sound kind of corny or trite, but if I’m going to go up there and spend the weekend climbing, I want to try out a bunch of different stuff and see how it performs – and I want to take that information back to the office and be able to speak from a position of experience – not supposition.
That doesn’t mean it feels like I’m working on the weekend – hell, no. We’re playing, having fun, and having a great time. Sometimes people tell us to stop talking about work – and we’re not talking about financial statements; we’re not talking about meeting budgets; we’re really talking about whether or not a particular piece of apparel performed to our expectations on that given climb or that given ski or whatever it might be. For us that’s a joy – we’re pretty passionate about what we do.
Take Risks
Everybody’s interested in what we’re doing, and everybody roots for us. Let’s face it – we’re a company that’s doing the right thing, that’s walking the walk and talking the talk, and everybody looks at us with a fair amount of curiosity. We’ve made significant steps toward swaying the corporate cultures that exist both within and outside of our industry. We do it primarily on the environmental front – ten years ago we made a very strategic decision to move all of our sportswear to organic cotton, which at the time was pretty risky because basically our sportswear division represented sixty percent of our sales. And obviously in order to make that switch to organic cotton, we had to subsidize some of our organic cotton farmers so they could afford to grow for us.
That basically raised our retail prices by two or three bucks, which is significant. Our fear was that our customers wouldn’t embrace that. But we came together as a company and decided that we were willing to go out of business if it didn’t work, because this was important enough to us to make the switch. Basically you know how the story winds up – not only did our customers support us, but our competition came to us via an invitation and learned how to do it as well.
We now have more clothing companies than ever looking at us. If we could only get someone like the Gap or Levi’s to make the switch to organic cotton, it would destroy the conventional cotton industry – there would be no reason to grow conventionally. So we have an organic cotton symposium every year, and we invite our competition to come to Patagonia to learn how to do it. They share with us and we share all the dos and don’ts of growing and maintaining a sustainable business. We’re going to do this – and we’re going to keep doing it.
