I believe there are few brands as authentic as Patagonia. I'm fairly certain that my partner in business has long tired of my praise for Mr. Chouinard and his apparel enterprise, as have many of my closest associates. So be it. Having never worked for the company, I can't, with any certainty, comment on how it actually operates from within. That being said, I have been a customer since my knucklehead days and I still use the first pieces that I scraped to purchase. So I guess I'm an evangelist, of sorts. Forgive me. I value their product and their process and that guides my purchase decisions every time. As other companies talk about sustainability, Patagonia does its best to convey their practice (and their own flawed policies) with a balance of conviction and reason.
Last season, they introduced The Footprint Chronicles. The idea is simple enough; pick a product, follow it through the development lifecycle, and communicate the good as well as the bad. The site demonstrates how – and where – materials were sourced, constructed, packaged, stored, shipped and sold. Then, it presents distances traveled, Carbon Dioxide emitted, waste generated, and energy consumed. And it solicits feedback. They actually want to know what the customer thinks, for good or ill. The company has tweaked this release to include more product and deeper story content. So is it perfect yet? Absolutely not, but in the spirit of every item developed at Patagonia, The Footprint Chronicles suggests that refinement is never fully done.
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