Many industries claim to be ethical but do not follow through with the perception they put out through advertising and social media campaigns. Such examples include Amazon’s attempts to brand themselves as being continuous and taking strides towards employment standards in the industry. Jeff Bezos’s stance is well known as he has repeatedly reiterated a 15$ an hour work week[1]. Despite that amazon actively monitors employees, penalizes employees, and is aggressively anti-union [2]. In contrast, I will discuss a company that from its inception has aimed to be socially and ethically responsible first Patagonia. Their original mission statement read “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis”.
Patagonia’s original mission statement was new and fresh during the 90s, to have a clothing business committed to doing no harm and looking to implement solutions for the environment first was fresh. They are not only looking to be socially responsible to their customers and employees but to the world. So, what has Patagonia done to follow through with that statement? “94%” of Patagonia’s current lines of clothing and equipment use recycled materials, leading to “20000 tons of Co2 emissions removed in just one year”[3]. Many companies that offshore or outsource work, do not translate their local standards and ethics for employees to the country where their manufacturing is outsourced. Patagonia is not one such company, at Patagonia, employs a Tier 1 monitoring system to monitor all factories and subcontractors that meet the standards of labor Patagonia expects. Furthermore, this system derives from the Fair labor association that Patagfoinia helped found to promote and certify these practices and compliances done at other organizations. The code of conduct includes detailed expectations on child labor, forced labor, wages, and more.
Most people associate Patagoinia with a clothing and equipment brand and do not know about their other business ventures. One significant one is a more recent venture Patagonia Provisions, a canned food brand. The canned food venture extends Patagonia’s principles of sustainability and is a part of their efforts to fulfill their new mission statement “We’re in business to save our home planet”, where they aim to not only be sustainably but actively make new ventures that help save the planet. It first started as a way to create “sustainably farmed tinned food” that was aimed at their already developed consumer base of outdoor activity participants like fish and buffalo jerky. But it has greatly expanded to creating certification programs as well as working with sustainability non-profits to change farmers’ practices to be better for the environment, many farmers that complied were subsidized and became part of Patagonia’s supply chain. Furthermore, the Provisions part of the company is actively trying to change consumer eating habits that would be greater for the environment like moving meat a known carbon-heavy part of people’s diet to become a side of a meal and replacing the loss protein with more sustainable proteins.
Dissecting all this information and the efforts Patagonia has gone to be an environmentally and socially conscious operation I have found many characteristics to aspire for in a business. They have not only made effort to be ethical employers, and be environmentally conscious while executing their business, but they have also gone out of their way to make it an integral mission of the company and make great efforts to save the planet in a wider scope beyond their business through staring various non-profits, organizations that promote sustainable activity and certifications programs. While Patagonia products are not the cheapest, they are high quality and apart funding a greater mission that many consumers do not mind paying the premium for due to various efforts they make toward social responsibility that I have listed above. I think many other businesses can look at Patagonia as an example of making quality products and socially conscious while still being a successful and profitable business.
- https://www.aboutamazon.com/impact/economy/15-minimum-wage
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/13/amazon-union-retaliation-allegations/
- https://www.tiso.com/blog/patagonia-sustainable-brand#:~:text=By%20using%20recycled%20content%2C%20Patagonia,buying%20well%20and%20buying%20less.
- https://www.patagonia.com/our-footprint/working-with-factories.html
- https://www.eater.com/23153166/patagonia-provisions-sustainable-pantry-tinned-fish-interview
