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Patagona strips tech workers of their uniform: the logo vest – San Francisco Chronicle


Patagonia outerwear comes in many flavors: fleece or puffy; vest or jacket; navy or heather gray. Patch on a corporate logo, and you’ve got what passes for a uniform in San Francisco’s tech sector.

Now, the Ventura clothing maker, seeking to advance its Earth-friendly capitalist agenda, is threatening to leave them stitchless as it gets choosier about its corporate partners.

Patagonia is starting to weed out certain corporate clients to focus on customers that “prioritize the planet,” it told The Chronicle. Patagonia is a Certified B corporation, a stamp of approval given to companies that promise to use profits as a force for good in the world. The apparel maker is now only signing up fellow B corporations, as well as members of 1% for the Planet, an eco-conscious business association, as corporate customers for branded logowear.

The change will not affect existing corporate clients, Patagonia said.

Binna Kim is one of the rejects. She runs a public relations firm out of New York focused on financial services. By coincidence, it’s named Vested. Her office contacted Patagonia’s corporate sales team to order vests emblazoned with a client’s logo.

A third-party seller turned down the request, Kim said. She tweeted a screenshot of the email Monday.

“Patagonia has nothing against your client or the financial industry, it’s just not an area they are currently marketing through our co-brand division,” the email said.

It went on to explain that Patagonia is taking a new direction, guided by its mission to save the planet. The retailer is “reluctant,” the seller said, to make branded apparel with businesses involved in oil and drilling, politics, religion and “financial institutions” like Vested. Patagonia would not comment on the email exchange.

“There’s a bit of excess happening, and they don’t want to be associated with it,” said Barg Upender, a serial tech founder who splits his time between Washington and San Francisco. He packed a Patagonia jacket for the trip to keep warm.

Nick Shmel threw on an electric blue jacket, with stitched-on logos for both Patagonia and his employer, ARX Networks, for a walk near South Park Tuesday.

“I wear it because it’s comfortable,” Shmel said. “It’s the perfect jacket for this area.”

Being a financial services company and a Certified B corporation aren’t mutually exclusive, though. Among the ranks are crowdfunding website Kickstarter; Obvious Ventures, a San Francisco investment firm created by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams; and New York’s Amalgamation Bank, one of few unionized banks in the country.

Etsy, one of the highest-profile B corporations, dropped its status in 2017, saying complying with the requirements wasn’t compatible with its corporate structure as a publicly traded company.

It’s unclear when Patagonia gear became the unofficial uniform of tech workers, though a 1999 Slate review of Kurt Andersen’s “Turn of the Century” makes a joke about the stereotype. From the engineering lab, it made its way first to Sand Hill Road, the one-time center of the venture capital industry near Stanford University, and the streets of San Francisco. As suits and ties grew passé and Silicon Valley rose as a center of wealth, Wall Street bankers started aping the West Coast look.


The sartorial cliché became canonized, though, in HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” Jared, the stiffly awkward head of business development at fictitious startup Pied Piper, sports a fleece vest from Patagonia’s Better Sweater line. The show’s production designer, Richard Toyon, told The Chronicle in 2014 that his staff spent months surveying the local landscape for inspiration — noting the shoes, backpacks and hairstyles of choice.

“Patagonia was clearly very important,” Toyon said.

For new arrivals, San Francisco International Airport has a vending machine that dispenses down vests from clothing retailer Uniqlo. It’s one of the highest-earning vending machines at the airport, generating $10,000 in sales per month on average, according to an airport spokesman.

Vested’s Kim said her staff of 70 employees at the New York City communications agency wear branded vests, but not from Patagonia.

The aspiring investor can, however, shell out $499 for the VC Starter Kit, a novelty gift that includes a (logo-less) Patagonia fleece vest, Allbirds sneakers, a book by billionaire Facebook investor Peter Thiel and a subscription to Wine Spectator.

Sumukh Sridhara, a product engineer at AngelList who created the site as a side project, plans to give proceeds to All Raise, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of female founders and investors in tech.

Sridhara said it makes sense why Patagonia would put an end to knitting certain logos on their gear.

“It certainly impacts the values that the company is trying to build,” he said in an email. “That being said, I think (venture capitalists) will still wear Patagonia vests — even if it doesn’t have their fund logo on it.”

Melia Russell is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: melia.russell@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meliarobin



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