Marketer Jelle Mul: ‘We see Patagonia as an experiment in the way of doing business’

When I was 14, I went with my dad and a friend who lives in Norway to cycle around the country and on every climb I would ‘drop them’ – I would be way stronger than them. They encouraged me to get into cycling, so I did and got pretty good at it. I rose up in the ranks and raced all around the world until I was 24.

At the same time, I was studying at Johan Cruyff University, which allowed you to combine your sports and study at the same time. Once I had graduated, I knew I wanted to do something other than cycling. I had a love for outdoor sports but racing bikes stopped me from pursuing them, so after quitting I really got into snowboarding and surfing, which led me to O’Neill and down the path of outdoor and action sports – and storytelling around those activities.

I really loved storytelling, especially through photography, as an art form both professionally and privately. That is part of what brought me to Patagonia but growing older, I also became more and more aware of the environmental issues we face.

When I was younger, in my first days at O'Neill, I got sent to do a photo shoot in Hawaii – and at that stage in my life, it was the best thing that could happen to me. Now, more than 20 years later, my drivers have changed. For example, we support grassroots NGOs working on root causes and we recently managed to protect a wild river in Croatia that was endangered by construction of a hydropower plant. Right now, that kind of campaign is the most rewarding thing for me to be involved with.

It's been a long journey to where I am today. It has not been a series of logical steps like many career paths. For me, it’s really been about following my heart and dreams. For example, every brand that I have worked for I absolutely loved. O'Neill was a brand I really loved. In high school, I would read snowboarding magazines from cover to cover, so when Burton knocked on my door, I knew all their snowboard models already so that made sense. What drew me to Sole Tech (Sole Technology) was not only the sports but also their mission to be carbon neutral which excited me to get involved.

Jelle presents a keynote lecture at OMR Festival

When was the first moment that you thought: “I get this marketing thing, this is me. This is my world?”

Focusing on storytelling and photography I got to meet a lot of photographers and started seeing the good from the bad, and noting the excellent too. I realized the power of amazing images. Music, art, photography and film all have the ability to affect people and change their minds and you can weave in a narrative.

I also saw that marketing could make a difference. I was working for this small NGO that was taking women out surfing in Iran, founded by a really impressive lady called Easkey Britton. I joined her organization to take photos and using those images to tell a story was very effective: I saw how you can build bridges and educate people and that really opened my mind to what marketing can do.

Another example might be this: I have a friend who broke his neck while mountain biking and has been paralyzed from the neck down for nine years. Together with a wider group of friends, we set up this fundraiser event for him with a lot of storytelling around it. Some of his friends are among the brightest storytellers and marketeers you can find and within five weeks, we raised €350,000.

We had the biggest bands in the Netherlands reaching out to us if you could play at this event. This helped my friend start an organization called Neuromove, which helps spinal cord injury patients with the aim of bringing Activity Based Therapy to the Netherlands and improving their quality of life. Through that, I really learned about collaboration, building momentum around good causes and how money can’t pay for the feeling you get from using your talents to help people.

Patagonia’s clothes are designed to last a lifetime and be easily repaired

From the last report that I can find, which is a couple of years old, Patagonia’s turnover was $1.5bn, you’ve got 3,000 employees, all of which puts you as a market leader in outdoor wear. But that – it could be argued – is small news compared with gestures like the $5.2m Patagonia spent on an 8,000 acre piece of land in Clark County, Alabama earlier this year. In short – it looks like everything’s going well for the business, but you’re also achieving great things for the environment. What does 2025 look like for you?

We’re a privately owned company, so we don’t disclose the precise financials, but we do publicize the work we’re doing together with our partners – NGOs and charities. We work with thousands of groups all around the world and support them in all their work, through grants and through marketing activations. We have a platform called ‘Patagonia Action Works’ which allows us to do this.

Next, there are our products: the way they are built is of the highest importance to us. We recognize that the market landscape can be challenging, but we know that customers look more for authentic, high-quality brands and that there is a growing interest in outdoor sports.

Next on the horizon for us is to make sure that we educate customers about our core sports and how you treat the places you get to play in. This is how we want to build a truly inclusive community. We keep building quality gear. We keep challenging ourselves to do better.

We started in the early ‘90s on our journey to using organic cotton. Within 15 years, our full line was organic cotton. But if you look on a global scale, at that time 1% of all cotton worldwide was organic. Sadly, it is still 1% of cotton worldwide that is organic. That means we still have work to do to really get other brands and companies on the same journey as us. Wetsuits are a great example of that. We have started making our wetsuits from natural rubber about 10 years ago and now you see more and more brands following us, which is great.

Could you summarize please: what is Patagonia and what is your offer?

We’re a brand founded in 1973 by a climber and surfer called Yvon and at that time, he and his friends were making removable climbing pitons that you hammer into the cliffs or mountainsides – they are a matter of life and death and how you secure yourself while climbing.

Previously, pitons were left where you used them – but with these ones you could remove them once you have climbed.

That philosophy was translated into our clothing with the inception of Patagonia. We build products for outdoor sports. We call them silent sports. They range from surfing to snowboarding, skiing, climbing, trail running and fly fishing. We are best described as a responsible business. We try to be as responsible as we can as we build these products for example through the use of preferred materials or Fair Trade certifications

Then the other side is the activist company. 1% of our revenue goes to grassroots environmental groups all around the world. And just recently, the ownership structure changed. We’re an unapologetically for-profit business, but on top of our work with 1% For The Planet, everything that is not reinvested into the company goes to the foundations we support and they invest in all these bigger projects around environmentalism.

Patagonia founder, Yvon Chouinard, back in the day

Full transparency: I co-wrote this book called Better Business On Purpose and we championed Patagonia. In my opinion, Patagonia is a really good example of a brand that walks the walk and doesn't just talk the talk. How much of a figure is your founder Yvon Chouinard in the business today, and how much does his philosophy follow through in everything that you guys do?

We’re an organization where everything is rooted in our core values. We are a for-profit business with everything that comes with that, but always with these core values leading any conversation. I hear that our global board meetings are most about the impact Patagonia can have and that really describes the company Patagonia is, [putting] planet and people before profits.

There’s a philosophy that has been handed down from the original founders and that is kept alive within the business. We often look back a lot at the things the company was doing back in the ‘70s and we even have internal philosophy classes from people who were around in those times. We learn about why things need to be built to last: because it’s crucial for people and planet.

Our founder, Yvon, doesn’t have a computer. You may find him in the office in Ventura, but he can also just be gone for three months and go fishing somewhere where nobody can reach him. The business doesn’t rely on him for the day-to-day but I would argue that the company completely operates on his philosophy. This creates really interesting internal conversations. You are constantly balancing the demands of the environment with business and challenging the status quo. It is how we work and how Yvon’s influence looms large.

I watched your ‘Fashion is none of our business’ film before this interview. Where are you at on the value of emotional connection with campaigns?

It’s all about emotion. That film was part of a bigger campaign which was focused on our quality through the lens of fashion, highlighting the fact that we are unfashionable. We have been building the same sort of gear for years and years, focusing on improving performance and impact, and don't follow the latest trends.

About a year ago, we launched a campaign to support NGOs in Iceland to ban open net fish farming. We try to figure out how we can touch people's hearts with that campaign.

Emotional connection is everything for us. The authenticity of storytelling is crucial, but emotion is what drives people to action. For a lot of our marketing, you won’t see just short-term conversion. We always prioritize the long-term view.

In Patagonia’s sights: ending salmon farming in Iceland

Could you tell me about Patagonia’s free repair service.

We offer something which is called ‘Ironclad Guarantee’ for all our products. If you buy a Patagonia product and it needs to be fixed, we will repair it or replace it. Repair is an essential part of what we’re saying as a responsible business. We built high-quality products that are made to be repairable and we advocate about the fact that people should keep their gear in use for longer. We take great pride in ourselves when we see a photo of somebody wearing ‘his dad’s’ or ‘her mom’s’ jacket. That means we’re ‘getting it right.’

As part of the design process, the team already makes sure that a product is repairable in case it breaks. It’s one of the 10 key design principles which every product must follow. These steps are essential for a product to go to market and reinforce quality every step of the way.

If you rip a zipper on a Patagonia product, we have a repair portal where people can easily submit their repair, send it over to us and have it fixed. We have different repair partners in different territories but we also go on the road with several vehicles around Europe, repairing not only Patagonia clothing, but also other brands. We see this as an educational tool because people need to understand that you should repair your stuff.

This also comes back to the emotional connection. A product is not just a product: the sweater you might be wearing was also being worn when you had certain experiences. Our clothing or equipment literally carry stories in them.

Patagonia’s mobile repair shops have championed the value and environmental impact of making clothes last

How do you surf the tsunami of making the best technology choices for Patagonia’s marketing?

We’re often held in high regards but I wouldn’t describe Patagonia as an organization that is pushing technology boundaries in marketing. We tell our stories through the tools we know and understand and we are very cautious about technology and new platforms.

In 2020 we joined an initiative called ‘Stop Hate For Profit’ – a group of brands that do not advertise on Facebook. Since then, we have never gone back and have also stopped advertising on X. Compared to those who chase the latest technology, we’re probably on the other side of the spectrum where our moral standards come into play and we question what is the ‘right thing’ and what isn’t.

Of course we monitor developments, but always consider: how do we have honest conversations with our customers? Sometimes the best form of marketing for us is having 25 people in the store having an in-person conversation rather than a lot of buzz online.

This approach is deeply ingrained in our company culture. Everybody who works at Patagonia cares about these things. You don’t just have a set of KPIs, and if you don’t hit them, you’re not successful. We think deeper. We see Patagonia as an experiment in the way of doing business. It’s a 100-year experiment, and we’re halfway in. Everything we do, we also consider the impact of those actions over the next 50 years.

I’m privileged to work for a company like Patagonia, where I am constantly challenged – and I can challenge myself and the teams to think differently. For a lot of other companies, the bottom line is the only thing that is important. In 2020 we did about 95% of our digital advertising on Facebook and it was working well for us. But leaving Facebook was 100% the right thing to do at that time and a decision I was very comfortable with.

Founder Yvon Chouniard speaks to the Patagonia team at a company away day

What initiative delivered on your watch are you the most proud of?

It’s all a team effort at Patagonia. If you look at any successful campaign we have done, we are not a top-down organization. We recognize that the best ideas are the best ideas – wherever they come from within the organization. We meet and discuss everything in great detail – sometimes to the frustration of others. But that creates just better products and better initiatives.

In 2018 we launched a film called ‘Blue Heart’ in support of environmental groups fighting to save wild rivers in the Balkan region. The groups saw that there were more than 3,000 dams being built around the Balkans and that it is one of the only pristine regions in Europe where rivers are still flowing freely.

If you dive deeper into what a wild, free flowing river actually means, it blows your mind and yet we have built dams all over Europe. The majority of these dams were funded by one bank, which was the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. We really focused on them to change the policies and now they have.

But even better, one of the rivers that had been marked for a dam, the Vjosa River in Albania, was declared a Wild River National Park in 2023. It’s an example of the achievements we are proud of and something where we can say: we had impact. That’s environmentalism.

Patagonia successes: Patagonia supported the campaign to suspend plans to dam the Vjosa river and have it declared a national park

What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?

I think the concept of marketing in the modern world needs to be myth-busted. Marketing has become a dirty word. All marketers together should come together and ask: “What the hell are we doing?”

Marketing started with a shop or a small brand doing something to make sure people knew about them. Along the way, it mutated into: “How can we fool people enough to buy our products?”

Marketing is storytelling – but is should be telling honest, true stories and making sure people know why they should believe in your brand and buy your products. Every marketer at every level should challenge themselves and ask “are we being honest and real?”

What advice might you give your younger self if you could go back in time, what should you do more of and what should you avoid?

I would advise myself to stop being insecure: just be yourself and follow your own path.

Your question from a fellow senior marketer is: tell us about a marketing failure you've been part of, and what did you learn from it?

We are often talking about failing forward here because if you push boundaries, you will inevitably fail sometimes. Something that I’ve not been successful at as much as I had hoped is to operationalise everything. I have learned that there is no silver bullet and Patagonia is a complex organization.

We support all of these groups. We have all of these different needs. We focus on all of these different sports. For our campaigns, we have to try and jam all of that into one season which is actually runnable. Through that, we learned that we can’t do everything. We need to prioritize and stay true to the things we are good at – for example telling authentic stories around our product impact and environmental action.

If you were interviewing a senior marketer, what question would you ask them?

I would ask: what are you and your job doing to make the world a little bit a better place?

If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…

People should not underestimate the power of storytelling. The world is built on narratives and that is in essence all marketing.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Tim Healey, is founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.