The Secret History of "Don't Buy This Jacket"
Happy Black Friday.
Patagonia long ago mastered the art of clever marketing.
As I detail in DIRTBAG BILLIONAIRE, a savvy creative sensibility and an uncanny ability to tap into the zeitgeist are part of what made Yvon Chouinard so successful over the years.
Still, there’s one Patagonia ad that stands above the rest: Don’t Buy This Jacket.
Some of the details of this famous campaign are well-known. On Black Friday in 2011, hoping to get shoppers thinking twice about buying stuff they didn’t need, Patagonia took out a full page ad in the New York Times with the famous tagline emblazoned above its latest fleece.
(The “propaganda” image above is from a rare Patagonia ad that appeared in The New Yorker as part of this year’s Black Friday campaign.)
But there’s a deeper history behind “Don’t Buy This Jacket” that I tell in DIRTBAG BILLIONAIRE, and which I’ve excerpted below.
The full story reveals the unlikely influences that led to the campaign, and shows the Patagonia team wrestling with its own contradictions as it contemplated making a statement that would define the brand for years to come.
Before I get to that, here’s how you can help:
Please buy DIRTBAG BILLIONAIRE. It’s the perfect holiday gift! Amazon, Bookshop, Porchlight (bulk discounts), or Barnes & Noble are all great.
I’m still on the road doing speaking events. If your company or organization is interested in having me talk about the book, or you know of someone who is, please reach out to me.
Now about that ad. . .
Back in 1990, Doug Tompkins — Yvon Chouinard’s best friend and the founder of both The North Face and ESPRIT — had placed an unusual ad in Utne Reader, a magazine that catered to the far left.
Titled “A Plea for Responsible Consumption,” Tompkins used the ad to bemoan the growing environmental toll of Esprit’s own operations and lament the rise of rampant consumerism. “We know this is heresy in a growth economy, but frankly, if this kind of thinking doesn’t catch on quickly, we, like a plague of locusts, will devour all that’s left of the planet,” Tompkins wrote. “We could make the decision to reduce our consumption, or the decision will soon be made for us.”
Tompkins was channeling the existential outrage that he and Chouinard had tapped into during their sojourns in the California hills, and it was no longer just idle talk. Esprit had just launched an “eco-collection” of women’s clothing, using organic cotton and natural dyes. At a time when few brands were touting their ecological bona fides, it was a revolutionary bit of product marketing and an early preview of wider industry efforts to clean up the supply chain.
But with the Utne Reader ad, Tompkins went even further, pleading with consumers to think twice before buying more stuff and suggesting that consumers could live a more righteous life if only they bought less. “By changing the things that make us happy and buying less stuff, we can reduce the horrendous impact we have been placing on the environment,” it concluded. “We can buy for vital needs, not frivolous, ego-gratifying needs.”
The Esprit ad made a minor splash when it was released, attracting some news coverage and putting Tompkins on the map as a heterodox thinker. But it’s real impact would be felt 30 years later.
That was when, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Patagonia was trying to figure out how to tell its story.
As Rick Ridgeway and Vincent Stanley, two longtime Patagonia executives, got to thinking about it, they realized it wasn’t enough to just make great stuff; a company also had to convince customers that it had their back if something went wrong. Patagonia needed to assure its community that it would repair damaged items, replace them when needed, and create a system to recycle worn- out apparel.
Some of this work was already underway. Patagonia had recently launched a program called Common Threads, later rebranded as Worn Wear, which saw the company buy back used items that were still in good shape and resell them. It also announced that it would accept all worn-out Patagonia gear, even if it couldn’t be resold. The company promised that donations wouldn’t go into a landfill—the goods would either be recycled or repurposed.
From there, discussions turned to an even more extreme idea: what if Patagonia could encourage customers to buy less stuff, period? It was one thing to promise to repair and recycle; it was way more radical to challenge shoppers to consider whether they needed a new jacket at all. Chouinard liked the idea in principle, but it wasn’t clear how to get the message across. Ridgeway floated closing all the stores on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, and putting up crime scene tape. That didn’t fly.
But as he kept thinking, Ridgeway eventually returned to “A Plea for Responsible Consumption,” the ad that Tompkins had placed in Utne Reader back in 1990. Tompkins was way ahead of his time when he prodded consumers to question whether they really needed to buy more clothes. What if now, more than two decades later and with the world reeling from the financial crisis, Patagonia did something similar?
Ridgeway came up with a tagline: “Don’t Buy This Jacket,” imagining the slogan plastered above an image of a new Patagonia fleece. He made a mock- up of a full- page newspaper ad and presented it to the Patagonia board. Chouinard was open to it, but Kris McDivitt Tompkins, the former Patagonia CEO who was still on the board, was skeptical. The message was hypocritical, she worried, and smacked of inauthentic marketing gimmickry. Patagonia was all about selling stuff; how could it tell consumers to buy less with a straight face? There was also the risk of losing sales at the most critical time of the year. Did they really want to do that?
She had a point, of course. McDivitt Tompkins was putting her finger on the paradox that had animated Patagonia for so long, the creative tension she had identified when she was CEO. Ridgeway went back to the drawing board and refined the messaging.
He incorporated Common Threads, which promoted Patagonia’s efforts to reduce waste and recycle products, and he drew inspiration from The Limits to Growth, a 1972 book published by the Club of Rome, which warned that annual, compound economic growth was “the elephant in the room” and would inevitably lead to the collapse of natural ecosystems. When he went back to the board and pitched it again, he got the green light.
On November 25, 2011, Patagonia took out a full- page ad in The New York Times. The day was symbolic. It was Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and an orgy of consumerism that kicked off the holiday shopping season. The ad was simple, and just as Ridgeway had imagined it: Above a picture of a gray zip-up R2 fleece was the phrase “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” Below that, the company explained its thinking.
“It’s Black Friday, the day in the year retail turns from red to black and starts to make real money,” the copy read. “But Black Friday, and the culture of consumption it reflects, puts the economy of natural systems that supports all life firmly in the red. We’re now using the resources of one-and-a-half planets on our one and only planet. Because Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time—and leave a world inhabitable for our kids—we want to do the opposite of every other business today. We ask you to buy less and to reflect before you spend a dime on this jacket or anything else.”
The ad went on to explain that it required 135 liters of water to produce the R2 jacket pictured, even though it was made with 60 percent recycled materials. “Don’t buy what you don’t need,” it concluded. “Think twice before you buy anything.”
The response was instantaneous. Trade publications lauded the ad as a brilliantly subversive bit of marketing, using the allure of the taboo to encourage people to buy yet more of Patagonia’s gear. Mainstream media outlets wrote news stories about the ad, and business schools created case studies about it.
“For that $57,000 ad in The New York Times, we got $40 million to $50 million of free publicity,” Casey Sheahan, who was CEO of the Patagonia at the time, told me.
The “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad was perhaps the purest expression of Patagonia’s unconventional philosophy to date, and in the months and years that followed, the company’s sales hit new heights.
“It was really a culmination of all these internal discussions we were having about what kind of company we wanted to be,” Sheahan said. “And it was all driven by the mission statement, which was to make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
Excerpted from Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All away.
Love this!
Happy Thanksgiving! Great article!