10 Percent : Patagonia Play Money

This ties into the past 2 blogs. I'm still staying true to my envelope system {though I'm wishing that I was making more money that was being divided up INTO the envelopes}. I've been savoring my 10% play money envelope, only spending sparingly. Well, after hours upon hours on the internet the other day, researching good gear for Ecuador, I obviously came upon Patagonia's site. Their stuff is ALL TIME...quality, integrity and just badass. It's a tad expensive, but you cannot beat the quality...this stuff will last you and years and years, as opposed to the Roxy gear you'll get -- lucky if that even lasts a season. I decided what I needed, headed to Supplies and I made two purchses {using my "play" money envelope} : The Morning Glory Dress and the Morning Glory Wrap Hoody. Lucky for me Surfer Supplies, the surf shop that I ride for, carries Patagonia, so I get a sweeeet discount.

Morning Glory Dress
retail $67, color: Afterglow

Morning Glory Wrap Hoody
retail $82, color: Earthenware

Both are made of stretchy, soft, synthetic jersey knit; wicks moisture and dries fast; brushed interior. 7-oz 86% nylon/14% spandex smooth-faced jersey knit with moisture-wicking performance.....perfect for Ecuador!! hahahahaha.

Our definition of quality includes a mandate for building products and working with processes that cause the least harm to the environment. We evaluate raw materials, invest in innovative technologies, rigorously police our waste and use a portion of our sales to support groups working to make a real difference. We acknowledge that the wild world we love best is disappearing. That is why those of us who work here share a strong commitment to protecting undomesticated lands and waters. We believe in using business to inspire solutions to the environmental crisis.

--Patagonia

Patagonia is quality all around. The product, the goal of the company, all the way down to their customer service! When I was on their site for over two hours the other day, checking out all the gear and reading reviews {EVERYONE writes their honest-to-goodness opinions} I was "live chat"ed by a Patagonia person. They said "hey, you've been on here for a while...do you need any help"? Ha. Well I ended up chatting with the rep for about an hour. We touched a bit on gear and goods, but mostly talked about traveling - the Jersey shore - Costa Rica and such. I told him that I was interested in perhaps getting a form of sponsorship from Patagonia, so he hooked me up with some emails and addresses. How cool is that??

Check em out.
This is the way that companies should be run.

www.patagonia.com

If you have the time, read this book about Patagonia's founder,
Yvon Chouinard

Amazon.com Review
Like the carefully engineered dies which created his company's first products--steel pitons and carabiners which climbing enthusiasts would recognize as primitive forerunners of today's sleeker gear--Yvon Chouinard is if nothing else an original. How many other shy French-Canadian boys become surf-and-climbing bums, then blacksmiths forging their own play tools, and eventually founders of world-renowned sports equipment and apparel companies like Patagonia? How many other heads of multi-million dollar enterprises open their memoirs by stating bluntly, "The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welches of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values. I wanted to be a fur trapper when I grew up." The proverbial mold from which Chouinard was cast got broken.

In Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, readers get a fascinating look inside the history and philosophy of both Patagonia and its irascible, opinionated founder. From its beginning, the book shares a sense of Chouinard's strong-willed personality and his love of the outdoors. He recounts a mostly happy childhood spent in a still-unspoiled southern California, climbing, diving, fishing, and surfing. The narrative soon moves into Chouinard's early entrepreneurial efforts, which were less focused on market-share domination than on earning a basic living to finance his own sporting habits. As his company's first catalog noted, delivery could be slow in the summer months, when Chouinard typically left the "office"--a dilapidated shack converted into an ironworks--for climbing adventures across the American West.

Eventually, though, the story settles into a pattern familiar to business audiences: Patagonia grows rapidly, takes on more employees and product lines to sustain hungry demand from customers, but overreaches with over-ambitious expansion plans and suffers a hiccup in its adolescence. This make-or-break juncture of a business's development often contains the most interesting material, and here Chouinard and his beloved company are no exception. He describes a series of wrenching decisions through which he and Patagonia management team navigated in 1991, as sales growth stalled while capital and operational expenses sprinted ahead. From this crisis emerged Patagonia's first-ever layoffs, affecting a hefty 20% of the workforce, and a serious re-examination of the business's core principles and methods.

The historical part of Chouinard's book largely ends at this point, and gives way to an exposition of philosophies which emerged at Patagonia during its dark moments in the early 1990s. The rest of the book serves as a kind of primer to business, the Patagonia way: one chapter each on product design philosophy, production philosophy, distribution philosophy, image philosophy, financial philosophy, human resource philosophy, and so on. Fans of Patagonia can revel in the company's working details, as can those who support or want to build businesses with self-consciously cultivated soulfulness.