Yvon Chouinard

Yvon Chouinard was born in 1938 in Lewiston, Maine, to a French-Canadian family, and spoke no English when they moved to California when he was eight. He was a poor student who lived for the outdoors, first falconry, then the climbing that got him down to the falcons' nests. In 1957 he bought a second-hand coal forge and taught himself to make pitons, the metal spikes that climbers hammered into cracks, because the European ones were soft and had to be left behind.

He sold them for a dollar and a half each from the back of his car, spending summers in Yosemite living on dented tins and, when broke, cat food. Through the 1960s Chouinard Equipment became the biggest climbing hardware maker in America. Then he saw what pitons were doing to the rock in Yosemite. In 1972 he dropped his main product line in favour of aluminium chocks that could be placed by hand, and the catalogue carried an essay urging climbers to change. Within months the chocks outsold the pitons.

Clothing began almost by accident, with rugby shirts he brought back from Scotland because their collars stopped the climbing slings chafing. Patagonia was founded as a separate company in 1973. He gave one per cent of sales to environmental groups from 1985, switched to organic cotton in 1996, told customers not to buy a jacket they did not need, and offered free repairs.

In 2022, aged 83, he and his family gave away the company, worth around three billion dollars, to a trust that protects its values and a non-profit that receives its profits to fight climate change.