Pop Quiz: Branding Patagonia — Alex Chrisman // Alta

Quotes

• “There’s a really good lesson with Patagonia. You can build a brand without trying to build a brand. It’s an incredibly authentic company that was built on actual values. It was putting purpose beyond profit from day one and I think that if you have a public-facing company, you’re going to get a brand no matter what you do. It’s a precipitate of action. You make choices and those choices are going to resonate with people and in a certain way, it is goingto build momentum and have an accumulative effect over time.” -Alex “I don’t know if Patagonia has a super tight brand manual but they have an incredible culture. I think this is the success of a really great brand, it is decentralized throughout the organization. They defined it from the top down initially because it started as a one-man company and Yvon wanted to make the best possible product and he wanted to do it with the least possible environmental impact.” -Alex“All of it is derived from a pretty singular place. Through consistency of choices that are beyond what would make a profit, what would resonate with customers, they said, ‘F that. We’re going to make the choices that build the company that we want, at the end of the day.” - Alex“It was demonstrated daily and that’s really the way that you should drive a change in the organization. If you really want all of your department to embrace the central thesis of the company in product, in marketing, in messaging, in every important facet, youcan only do that by leadership being demonstrative of those values and all of their choices and committing to them to the point of personal sacrifice.” -Alex“I think now more than ever, is a time for companies to really stick to their gun, be very niche, know who they are, and know who their customer is, and not try to make everybody happy. If nobody hates you, nobody loves you either. That road to vanilla is where people lose themselves.” -Alex“The strongest driver to long-term revenue growth is retention. If you have a strong brand and you can drive that retention and at the same time it continues to add to your pool of customers, I think you’re doing yourself a much bigger service than just trying to hit the largest amount of eyeballs.” -Alex“I’m looking at the Patagonia logo here and it’s clear to me how they came up with this logo. They are about environmentalism as much as they are about the productand the visual cues on the logo are the beautiful sunset, something that should be preserved.” -Alex“You mentioned color and again there’s a really great example with Patagonia. They’ve tried to avoid design obsolescence over their products. So you look at their color palette and it’s not a 2020 trending color palette. When you look at their product, it’s the same thing. They don’t track with the fashion world.” -Alex“They have stuck to a palette that is fairly neutral and fairly timeless. In doing so, they have broken with the fashion industry and created their own particular aesthetic where Patagonia shows up in wacky colors. The way that they show up, that becomes the product expectation just like the way when you walk into an Apple store, it should always look and feel like an Apple store.” -Alex“Patagonia shows up in the right places doing the right things. Every place that you see a Patagonia product you see a mention of a cause and a lot of the money and attention gets funneled back to causesthat have nothing to do with the product. -Alex