Patagonia Told New York Times Readers Not to Buy Its Jacket

On November 25, 2011, the day after Thanksgiving, The New York Times ran a full-page Patagonia ad with three words above a photo of a gray fleece: "Don't Buy This Jacket." Below it, the copy itemized the cost of producing one R2 — 135 liters of water, 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, two-thirds of the jacket's weight in waste — and asked readers to think hard about whether they actually needed another fleece.

The message had teeth because Patagonia meant it as policy, not as a brand stunt. The same year, founder Yvon Chouinard rolled out the Common Threads Initiative, which committed the company to repair, resell, and recycle its own product. Customers were told they could mail back any jacket and get it patched.

What happened next is the part that confused the marketing press. Sales went up. Patagonia revenue climbed about 30 percent in 2012, to roughly $543 million. The company had spent $57,000 on the ad and, as then-CEO Casey Sheahan later told reporters, picked up an estimated $40 to $50 million in earned media coverage. Telling people not to buy the jacket sold the jacket.

There is a tidy way to read this — that anti-consumption messaging is just very good marketing, and Patagonia is the company that figured that out. The harder reading is that the audience for an outdoor fleece is people who already feel implicated in the supply chain, and the ad gave them a reason to side with the brand instead of avoiding it. Either way, it kept working. By 2022 Chouinard transferred ownership of the company, valued at around $3 billion, to a trust whose profits go to climate work — which is the same argument as the 2011 ad, scaled up to the entire company.