Patagonia has a playbook for fighting Trump. Here’s what other companies can learn

[ResidentialBusiness]

Five years ago, if you bought a particular pair of shorts from Patagonia, you might have noticed a message sewn into the back of the label: “Vote the assholes out.”

It was one step in the outdoor retailer’s fight against the first Trump administration. When the administration announced plans to reduce national monuments, for example, the company temporarily replaced its homepage with the message, “The President Stole Your Land.” Along with others, it helped mobilize millions of public comments. The company later sued the president over his plans to dramatically shrink the size of Bears Ears National Monument.

Now that Trump is back in office, the company is beginning a new fight. The team started strategizing last month, when the Trump administration announced that it planned to open up more public lands to oil and gas drilling and later started slashing jobs at national parks and in the Forest Service.

[Photo: Patagonia]

For Patagonia, there’s an obvious business case for pushing back against the administration’s policy, beyond the company’s core mission to protect the planet. “The outdoor industry relies on our whole system of public lands as the infrastructure that our community members use to get out and use our products and connect with the outdoors,” says Hans Cole, VP of environmental activism at Patagonia. “When you attack that infrastructure, that set of protected landscapes, absolutely we could see impacts.”

Some of those impacts could happen quickly. Around 1,000 National Park Service employees were fired last month, along with 3,400 Forest Service workers. (After the administration also rescinded the job offers for 5,000 seasonal Park Service employees, it later reversed that decision; it’s not clear yet how many of those positions will be filled.) Even with some seasonal workers in place, parks might struggle to maintain operations this spring and summer and fewer people might decide to visit. If hikers and campers don’t make trips, “we see immediate impacts in our business,” Cole says. “Folks don’t want to buy the jacket.”

The impacts go beyond the outdoor industry. “It’s also the local communities that are adjacent to protected public lands or simply to open public spaces” he says. “Local communities rely on a lot of tourism and visitation. Small businesses rely on folks coming into town during the summer.”

Patagonia has always been unabashedly political, so it’s unsurprising that the company is stepping back into the fray even as most other businesses hesitate to criticize Trump. Right now, many companies that spoke out against Trump in his first administration are silent; some business leaders, like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, have cozied up to the president after criticizing him in the past. But for companies that want to be more vocal now—because they fundamentally disagree with Trump policy and/or because it can directly impact their bottom line—Patagonia offers some lessons.

First, companies should choose an issue to focus on. Patagonia’s team cares broadly about the environment, but strategically focuses on policy that impacts public lands.

“We have to make choices about what we go deepest on and where we put the most resources,” says Cole. “It’s something that businesses are really good at doing, because we do it all the time. We make strategic choices about which market to go into or which product to focus on. The business community is uniquely suited to come into a landscape like this, assess, and say, ‘OK, we care about all these things, and we’ll find ways to stay connected to each one of them and stay educated on that. But we’re going to go deepest on this piece here.’”

With public lands, “we know our community cares about these things, we know this is important to our business, and we know we have an authentic and informed point of view,” he says. “We can step into that chaotic landscape with a lot of confidence.”

It’s also helpful for companies to collaborate with peers. “We know that voices together can make a difference, and when business voices come together, it’s a unique voice that often decision-makers will listen to,” says Cole. Patagonia is now having daily calls with others across the industry.

Brands can also play a role in keeping customers informed as the administration plows forward in making changes, and nudge citizens to contact representatives. The government hasn’t yet outlined the details of its plans for public lands—though the general direction toward weakening protections and opening it up for more exploitation is clear. Patagonia chose to start speaking out early. Public pressure does work, Cole says. “It’s urgently important right now for folks to be educating themselves about what’s going on and reaching out to their members of Congress to say what they care about.”

Patagonia is taking a multipronged approach that begins with alerting people to the challenge. A recent Instagram ad, for example, explained that Trump wanted to sell off public lands, and pointed customers to more information. CEO Ryan Gellert published an op-ed in Time. And more creative campaigns will follow, in the spirit of the message that the company hid in its label in 2020.

“It’s always a challenge to cut through the noise,” says Cole “The chaos of the sheer volume of issues, the number of things that people care about in the national political space, not to mention locally or in people’s lives. It’s so noisy right now that the more creative we get and the more we can connect with folks in a way that includes a great story, a really powerful voice, some humor, even in the midst of a lot of dark and challenging moments—it does work.”

Ultimately, he says, the company always connects its messages with action. “We try not to put words or stories out without some paired idea around, ‘What could you do?’ so that people don’t walk away feeling overwhelmed,” he says. “[They’re] empowered, even in some small way: Make that first call to your member of Congress, even if it’s just to say something high level. Reach out and support a local grassroots group through Action Works [a digital platform from Patagonia]. Get out there and volunteer . . . Reaching people with those kinds of messages, I think, can be really powerful.”

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