ABSTRACT
Patagonia—founded by Yvon Chouinard, a world-class climber—is a designer, marketer, and distributor of high-performance outdoor wear. Chouinard originally named the company Chouinard Equipment, and it soon evolved into the firm now named after a wild and rugged region of southern Argentina and Chile. In the 1980s, the company expanded its brand to include accessories (e.g., hats, children’s outdoor wear, and surf wear) and through successive organizational iterations, sales and profit margins grew rapidly (although not smoothly) through the 1980s and 1990s. By 2010, Patagonia was a highly recognized name.
