“Don’t Buy This Jacket”: an ad that only works if the company means it

Case study · Marketing 465 · Human-Centered Marketing

Patagonia’s 2011 Black Friday ad earned trust because the business already had repair, resale and recycling programs behind the message.

The situation

Black Friday is the start of the U.S. holiday shopping season and one of the biggest sales days of the year for retailers. Nearly every brand uses it to push people to buy more.

Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company, had been building programs to reduce the footprint of its own products for years. According to a 2015 IMD case, it launched the Common Threads Recycling Program in 2005. The company has said that repairing gear has been part of its business “since the 1970s.”

The challenge

Patagonia’s leaders believed that making more stuff, even good stuff, harms the planet. But Patagonia is a company that makes money by selling clothes. How does a brand talk openly about consumption without looking like a hypocrite, or like it is pulling a stunt?

That tension was real inside the company. Longtime executive Rick Ridgeway came up with the idea and mocked up the ad. According to journalist David Gelles, former CEO and board member Kris McDivitt Tompkins was skeptical. She worried the ad would look hypocritical and gimmicky, and that it could cost sales in the most important season of the year. Ridgeway revised the message and the board approved it.

What they did

On Friday, November 25, 2011, Black Friday, Patagonia ran a full-page ad in The New York Times. The headline read “DON’T BUY THIS JACKET” over a photo of its R2 fleece, one of its best sellers. The copy explained the environmental cost of making that jacket, including the water it took to produce, even though it was made with recycled material.

The ad was not a one-off message. It invited readers to take the Common Threads Initiative pledge, built on five Rs.

• Reduce: Patagonia makes gear that lasts, and you don’t buy what you don’t need.
• Repair: Patagonia helps you fix its gear, and you pledge to fix what’s broken.
• Reuse: Patagonia helps find a home for gear you no longer need.
• Recycle: Patagonia takes back worn-out gear to keep it out of landfills.
• Reimagine: together, aim for a world where “we take only what nature can replace.”

What happened

The ad cost about $57,000, according to Gelles. Casey Sheahan, Patagonia’s CEO at the time, estimated it generated $40 million to $50 million in free publicity. The 2015 IMD case reports that sales rose roughly 30% in the nine months after the ad.

Patagonia kept building the programs behind the message.

• Worn Wear, a storytelling program featuring customers’ well-used, patched Patagonia gear (IMD, 2015).
• Worn Wear resale launched online in 2017 and had sold more than 120,000 used items by late 2019 (Retail Dive, 2019).
• By 2019, Patagonia said it repaired more than 100,000 items a year, and called its Reno, Nevada, facility the largest apparel repair center in North America (Retail Dive, 2019).

Why it worked

The ad was surprising, which got attention. But surprise alone does not build trust. People believed it because Patagonia could point to repair services, used-gear sales and take-back recycling that already existed or followed soon after. The values showed up in operations, not only in the ad.

It also spoke to how its customers actually think. Many of them care about the outdoors and about waste. The ad treated them as people who could make a thoughtful choice, not as targets for a holiday promotion.

Where it gets complicated

Sales went up. That is good for Patagonia, but it raises a fair question: did an ad asking people to buy less end up helping the company sell more? Business school cases, including the 2015 IMD case, frame this as a real tension between growth and the message of reducing consumption.

McDivitt Tompkins’s worry also never fully goes away. Any “don’t buy” message from a company that sells products can be read as clever marketing. The only answer is evidence: programs, numbers and choices that cost the company something. Without Worn Wear and repair, the ad would read as a stunt.

The marketing principle

Human-centered marketing starts from what people value and treats them as thoughtful adults. Patagonia’s ad made a bold values claim, and the business backed it with repair, reuse and recycling programs customers could actually use. Values only build trust when the business acts on them, not just the ads.

Sources

• Don’t Buy This Jacket, Black Friday and the New York Times, Patagonia (2011)
• The Secret History of “Don’t Buy This Jacket”, David Gelles (Substack) (n.d.)
• Patagonia’s sustainability strategy: Don’t buy our products, IMD Business School (2015)
• Patagonia opens first Worn Wear store, Retail Dive (2019)

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