Patagonia Says 'Don't Buy This Jacket'

The story

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is famous for crowds, big sales and shopping carts piled high. On that day in 2011, November 25, readers of The New York Times turned to a full-page ad from Patagonia, a California company that makes outdoor clothing and gear. Above a photo of one of its best-selling fleece jackets, the R2, the headline said: "Don't Buy This Jacket."

The ad explained why. Making that one jacket, it said, used 135 liters of water, enough to meet the daily needs of 45 people. Shipping it from where it was made to Patagonia's warehouse in Reno, Nevada, created nearly 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, a gas that warms the planet. Along the way, the jacket left behind waste equal to about two-thirds of its own weight. And this was a jacket made with 60 percent recycled polyester. The message was not that the jacket was bad. It was that everything we buy has a cost to the earth, so we should "buy less and reflect before" spending money.

The ad pointed readers to Patagonia's Common Threads Initiative, a pledge with five R's. Patagonia promised to make long-lasting products, help people repair them, help them find new owners, and take back worn-out gear for recycling. Customers were asked to reduce what they buy, repair what breaks, reuse or pass on what they don't need, and keep old gear out of landfills. The fifth R was to "reimagine a world where we take only what nature can replace."

According to a later account by journalist David Gelles, the idea came from longtime Patagonia executive Rick Ridgeway, and the ad cost about $57,000 to run. Not everyone inside the company was sure it was wise. Some worried it would look like a clever trick, or that it would cut sales during the most important shopping season. Then-CEO Casey Sheahan later said the ad brought "$40 million to $50 million of free publicity." Patagonia's sales went on to reach new highs in the following years, which led some critics to point out the irony of an ad against buying that may have helped the company sell more.

The repair part of the promise was real, not just words. Patagonia runs a repair center in Reno that the company calls the largest clothing repair operation in North America. By 2017 it employed about 45 full-time repair technicians and fixed about 40,000 items a year. The company later renamed its repair, resale and used-gear efforts "Worn Wear," sent a repair truck on tours to fix clothing from any brand, and worked with the repair website iFixit to publish free guides so people could mend their own gear.

Patagonia's founder, Yvon Chouinard, took the idea further in September 2022, when his family gave away its ownership of the company. Most of the company's stock went to a nonprofit called the Holdfast Collective, which was set to receive about $100 million a year in profits to fight the environmental crisis.

The "Don't Buy This Jacket" ad worked because it matched what the company actually did. Plenty of companies talk about values. Patagonia backed its words with products built to last and a repair shop to keep them going.