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Sustainability-focused outerwear brand Patagonia is cutting 41 jobs as part of a major restructuring — the company’s second round of job cuts this year.
In a LinkedIn post announcing the layoffs, CEO Ryan Gellert said the company was undergoing “major internal changes that are critical for our success in the near term and foundationally important for our next 50 years.”
Most roles at the company’s Ventura, California headquarters will evolve to focus on three key functions: product, marketing and impact, Gellert said. While the restructuring has also created new roles, the layoffs will affect around 1 percent of the company’s workforce, he added.
Privately-held Patagonia’s last major restructuring was in 2022, when the company made “earth” its only shareholder. The business is now nearly wholly owned by a nonprofit whose mandate is to use any earnings not reinvested in the company to protect the environment and fight climate change. The company doesn’t publish regular earnings, but Gellert told The Business of Fashion in a May interview that its last financial year (which ended in April) had been “tricky.”
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”While we remain profitable, we are vulnerable to the same economic headwinds many companies in our industry are facing,” he said in his LinkedIn post this week.
The latest round of layoffs come after 90 remote customer service staff were told in June they would need to relocate to one of seven metropolitan areas near a Patagonia “hub” or lose their jobs.
Learn more:
‘In Business to Save the Planet’: The Patagonia Paradox
The American outerwear giant’s profits are meant to fight climate change, but its means of generating them do the opposite. CEO Ryan Gellert talks to BoF about the contradiction at the heart of Patagonia’s business, why he’s gambling on resale and the company’s efforts to curb consumption.
