Castle

Yvon Chouinard

Yvon Chouinard is founder of outdoor wear maker Patagonia, based in Ventura, California. Chouinard doesn't have his own office at Patagonia's California headquarters. Since 1984, the company has had no private offices. His apparel business took off in the 1970s when Chouinard imported rugby shirts from England and sold them to climbers. Since 1985, Patagonia has set aside 1% of sales to finance grassroots environmental groups in the U.S. and abroad. Revenues hit $750 million in 2015. Chouinard got his start as a climber in 1953 as a 14-year-old member of the Southern California Falconry Club, which trained hawks and falcons for hunting. After one of the adult leaders taught the boys how to rappel down the cliffs to the falcon aeries. Yvon and his friends became so fond of the sport they started hopping freight trains to the west end of the San Fernando Valley, to the sandstone cliffs of Stoney Point. There, eventually, they learned to climb up as well as rappel down the rock. By 1957, when he was 19, he had already revolutionized mountaineering by creating a piton that could be nailed into and then removed from rock, unlike the European kind, which had to be left in place. He could make two in an hour on his portable forge, and he sold them from the trunk of his car for $1.50 each. In Yosemite, Chouinard and his friends were called the Valley Cong. He supported himself selling gear from the back of his car, but he profits were slim. There was soon enough demand for Chouinard's gear that he couldn't keep making it by hand; he had to start using tools and dies and machinery. So in 1965, he went into partnership with Tom Frost, who was an aeronautical engineer as well as a climber, and had a keen sense of design and aesthetics. During the nine years that Frost and Chouinard were partners, they redesigned and improved almost every climbing tool, to make them stronger, lighter, simpler, and more functional.

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Yvon Chouinard

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