Patagonia and the company that chose purpose

In 1957, in a chicken coop behind his parents' house in Burbank, California, Yvon Chouinard set up a small blacksmith shop. He had bought a secondhand coal-fired forge. His product was simple and unforgiving: steel pitons, the metal pieces climbers hammered into cracks in the rock to protect a climb. Chouinard made them for friends, then sold them from the back of his car. He was a climber before he was a company founder, and he disliked the word businessman. In the account of his life published by The Guardian, he described himself as a craftsman, even an "existential dirtbag." The phrase sounds like a joke until you see the business it produced. The first customer was not a market segment. It was the person standing beside him at the cliff, asking whether the gear would hold. For years, the logic was direct: make stronger hardware, sell more of it, go climbing again. But the rocks began to answer back.