What you need to know about Patagonia’s WIP report
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Transparency is something we champion a lot in our work.
We believe that sharing your progress towards becoming a more environmentally friendly business is better than keeping quiet because you’re not achieving perfection.
And this is exactly what outdoor wear company Patagonia has done with its new Work in Progress (WIP) impact report. It’s designed to shed light on Patagonia’s sustainability progress and share best practice and learnings with the industry.
What’s surprising is that Patagonia – often held up as one of the most sustainable mainstream businesses – hasn’t released such a report before.
We can’t help but wonder if the timing is deliberate with the report dropping just as early Black Friday sales started gearing up – given Patagonia’s history of subverting and spotlighting the overconsumption of the shopping event.
At 154 pages long, there’s a lot to unpack in the WIP report, so here are the biggest takeaways we spotted.
Image credit - Patagonia/Tim Davis
Goal progress can be slow
In 2015, Patagonia publicly set itself a series of 10 year-goals. This first Impact Report shares the company’s progress on each of these, and it makes for mixed reading.
For example, Patagonia has made good progress on its goal of using 100% preferred materials (defined by its partner Textile Exchange as fibres or raw materials with reduced impacts and increased benefits for climate, nature and people), reaching 84% (by purchased weight) of fabrics and trims being preferred materials.
It also achieved its goal to eliminate forever chemicals from its product line with 100% of new products now made without intentionally added PFAS.
But Patagonia massively missed its goal of 50% using secondary waste for its synthetics as just 6% of its synthetic fabrics are made from secondary waste in 2025.
It highlights how hard it is to scale the use of secondary waste, which is often contaminated and made of mixed materials, and turn it into the quality of material companies require. Patagonia is looking at other waste options as a material source, such as food and agricultural waste and textile-to-textile recycling, but this comes with its own challenges around scale.
Patagonia also isn’t there yet with its goal to ensure a living wage for all workers at its supply chain factories.
As of 2024, 39% of factories in its supply chain are paying a living wage, 29% are paying wages that are 80% of living wages, and the remainder are paying wages that are 50% or more of living wages.
Image credit - Patagonia/Arnold Drapkin | ZUMA Press | Alamy
Decarbonising is complicated
One of Patagonia’s 10-year goals in 2015 was to achieve carbon neutrality.
However, it soon pivoted on this idea to instead aim to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. To do this, it says it needs to reduce emissions by roughly 10% every year, but that at the same time greenhouse gas emissions for FY25 increased by 2% year-on-year.
Part of the problem is that almost 99% of Patagonia’s emissions come from its supply chain. And although the company takes responsibility for the need to decarbonise, it doesn’t own its supply chain and is one of many companies working with the same factories.
One interesting concept Patagonia is exploring is providing funding directly to suppliers to pay for large-scale decarbonisation projects.
In a pilot project with a raw-material supplier in Taiwan, Patagonia has funded a new steam boiler that will replace the previous coal-fired one.
As part of this, Patagonia signed a contract with the supplier for the next 3 to 10 years stating that it will cover 100% of the costs associated with decarbonising the steam boiler, giving both sides security.
Image credit - Patagonia/Ryan Struck
Balancing growth and sustainability is hard
Patagonia makes it clear that, as a for-profit business, it’s not trying to stop growth. At the same time, the company talks about how everything it does has an impact, which means unconditional growth isn’t feasible.
Its solution is to try and find ways to grow responsibly, with the report highlighting three main strategies.
The first is focusing on building better products which last longer, which can then support more sustainable business models like repair and resale.
The second is about ‘meeting customers where they are’ by opening new stores in places with existing Patagonia customers and improving the online experience.
The third is only expanding Patagonia’s wholesale partnerships with dealers who are truly engaged with their customers and communities.
While, yes, not selling through every chain possible and only expanding into markets with demand, may mean Patagonia doesn’t grow as much as it could, it doesn’t feel like these goals do much to reduce growth overall.
There are no targets or commitments related to capping growth or reducing it, highlighting Patagonia’s point about growth being inextricably tied to being a for-profit business.
The report highlights resale as an alternative revenue – ie growth – opportunity but also shared some less-than-encouraging-in-context stats about Patagonia’s Worn Wear used clothing programme, which first started in 2012.
In FY25, annual revenue from Worn Wear was $13 million. But Patagonia’s total revenue for the 2024-2025 fiscal year was $1.47 billion.
This means that Worn Wear only represents around 1% of Patagonia’s entire business currently.
This is despite the fact that Patagonia has been repairing clothes and equipment since 1976 and operates the largest apparel mending facility in the US. In FY25, the company repaired 174,799 products across the globe.
Whether it can make resale a more central part of the business will be a key watchpoint over the next few years.
Balancing growth and sustainability is hard
Patagonia makes it clear that, as a for-profit business, it’s not trying to stop growth. At the same time, the company talks about how everything it does has an impact, which means unconditional growth isn’t feasible.
Its solution is to try and find ways to grow responsibly, with the report highlighting three main strategies.
The first is focusing on building better products which last longer, which can then support more sustainable business models like repair and resale.
The second is about ‘meeting customers where they are’ by opening new stores in places with existing Patagonia customers and improving the online experience.
The third is only expanding Patagonia’s wholesale partnerships with dealers who are truly engaged with their customers and communities.
While, yes, not selling through every chain possible and only expanding into markets with demand, may mean Patagonia doesn’t grow as much as it could, it doesn’t feel like these goals do much to reduce growth overall.
There are no targets or commitments related to capping growth or reducing it, highlighting Patagonia’s point about growth being inextricably tied to being a for-profit business.
The report highlights resale as an alternative revenue – ie growth – opportunity but also shared some less-than-encouraging-in-context stats about Patagonia’s Worn Wear used clothing programme, which first started in 2012.
In FY25, annual revenue from Worn Wear was $13 million. But Patagonia’s total revenue for the 2024-2025 fiscal year was $1.47 billion.
This means that Worn Wear only represents around 1% of Patagonia’s entire business currently.
This is despite the fact that Patagonia has been repairing clothes and equipment since 1976 and operates the largest apparel mending facility in the US. In FY25, the company repaired 174,799 products across the globe.
Whether it can make resale a more central part of the business will be a key watchpoint over the next few years.
Image credit: Patagonia/Keri Oberly
Materials and waste remain an issue
Perhaps one of the biggest insights from the report is that – as of FY25 – 85-90% of Patagonia’s products don’t have an end-of-life solution.
This is because of their mixed material nature, which is the result of the technical performance and durability that Patagonia aims to offer.
Even though Patagonia primarily uses recycled materials in its products – over 93% of its polyester and 89% of its nylon is recycled – ultimately its products are still made from hard-to-recycle materials, meaning they have a fixed lifespan and become waste to manage.
The scale of the issue becomes clear when you consider that Patagonia only gets back less than 1% of all products it has ever made for recycling.
And of these items, only about 20% have a recurring recycling solution. The remaining 80% is held indefinitely at Patagonia’s facility in Reno, Nevada, as well as locations in Europe and Japan.
Patagonia is continuing to explore solutions to this – and many of its other sustainability challenges – through pilots, partnerships, and even investment, but it’s clear that the company can’t fix everything alone.
Every textile company is facing the exact same problems and progress is only going to happen if everyone pitches in.
Image credit - Patagonia/Cory Richards
More learnings than solutions
Patagonia’s WIP report makes for interesting reading because it highlights that trial-and-error is an unavoidable part of trying to reduce environmental impact.
A lot of this is new territory for the industry and what’s feasible, valuable, and actually impactful, isn’t always clear until you try things out.
Wins are often the result of years of work, such as Patagonia spending nearly 20 years figuring out how to remove PFAS chemicals from its products.
Certainly, there are more learnings than solutions in Patagonia’s WIP report, particularly around critical impact points like production, growth and supply chains.
But, at least by sharing them with the wider world, some good may come of them.
