Repair and Renew
On the morning of Black Friday, 25 November 2011, Patagonia ran a full page in the New York Times: a photograph of its own jacket and the line «Don't Buy This Jacket». The advertisement cost $57,000. Worn Wear, begun in 2013, is repair and resale: in the 2024–25 year it repaired 174,799 items worldwide. The business of not selling but mending brought in thirteen million dollars — about one per cent of the company. What is pushing this model now is regulation. In 2021 France became the first country to require products to carry a repairability score. New York followed in 2022, California in 2023, the EU issued its right-to-repair directive in 2024, and Apple began selling parts for self-repair in 2022. A backflow against designs you cannot open. And in September 2022 the founder, Yvon Chouinard, handed the whole of the company — some three billion dollars of stock — to a trust and an environmental organisation. «Earth is now our only shareholder,» the company wrote. Beside the river of not selling but lending runs another: selling, and then keeping the thing alive. The band of temple carpenters who passed a craft down one heir at a time is saying the same thing in older words.
The myth, corrected
Telling people «don't buy this jacket» made sales go up
On the numbers alone, revenue rose about thirty per cent the following year. But that was also the year the company opened fourteen new stores. To conclude that one advertisement lifted the sales, the causation is missing. «We campaigned against consumption and it made us money» is a story that travels beautifully — and this map is suspicious of the beauty.