The North Face and Patagonia grew from the same roots

One road trip, two outdoor brands

In 1968 Doug Tompkins, who had opened The North Face's first shop in San Francisco two years earlier, drove to southern South America with Yvon Chouinard and the climbers Dick Dorworth and Chris Jones. The group called themselves the Fun Hogs. They made the third ascent of Mount Fitz Roy and filmed the journey as Mountain of Storms.¹

Chouinard had been selling hand-forged climbing equipment since 1957.² Five years after the trip, in 1973, his business opened Great Pacific Iron Works, Patagonia's first store.² By then Tompkins was no longer part of The North Face. In 1968 he sold his stake for $50,000 and co-founded the fashion company Esprit.¹ Two American outdoor brands therefore trace back to two men who shared a car, a rope and a mountain in the same year.

The same starting point, two different paths

What happened next explains much of how the two brands present themselves today. The North Face lost its founder within two years of opening its shop and grew under other owners, until VF Corporation acquired it in 2000.^1,3 Its own history names Tompkins as the young climber who "used his savings to start a revolution" in 1966, then moves on to products, athletes and expeditions.⁴ The founder appears in the first chapter and leaves. The brand's identity was built on what it made and who wore it on the mountain.

Patagonia took the opposite route. It remained with Chouinard for nearly 50 years, and in 2022 he transferred the company to a trust and a non-profit under the line "Earth is now our only shareholder".⁵ Its public voice has stayed close to its founder's own. Where The North Face speaks mainly through athletes, Patagonia has long spoken through the person who started it.

The two founders' lives stayed connected after they had gone separate ways in business. Kris McDivitt began working with Chouinard in 1973 and became Patagonia's first CEO, a role she held for 14 years.⁶ In 1994 she married Doug Tompkins.¹ The founder of The North Face and the first chief executive of Patagonia went on to spend the rest of their lives together, buying land in Chile and Argentina to turn it into national parks.¹

Shared values, different voices

The common origin is still visible in what both brands say they stand for. The North Face's mission includes supporting "the preservation of the outdoors" alongside making gear and inspiring exploration.⁷ In 1989 it co-founded the Conservation Alliance with REI, Patagonia and Kelty, an entry its own history lists among its milestones.⁴ Competitors in the shop were partners in the cause.

The founder whom The North Face's history mentions only once lived out that part of its mission on a national scale. Through Tompkins Conservation, he and Kris Tompkins acquired more than 2 million acres, and in March 2018 Chile accepted the gift of 1 million acres from the foundation for a network of protected areas.¹ Doug Tompkins did not see it; he died in a kayaking accident in Chile in December 2015.¹

For The North Face, this is a heritage it holds without telling. Its stated values have a history older than its marketing, carried by a founder who left the business but not the cause. For Patagonia, the same story confirms what it already says about itself. The two brands draw on the same roots and use them very differently.

A film that brings the roots back into view

The connection reached a wide audience in 2023 through Wild Life, a documentary by Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi that premiered at South by Southwest on 12 March and was released by National Geographic Documentary Films and Picturehouse.⁸ The film is about Kris and Doug Tompkins and their parks; the brands appear only as the lives the couple left behind. Alongside the couple it follows Yvon Chouinard and Kris's early years at his company, so the founding figures of both brands share the screen.⁸ Its co-director is himself a North Face athlete, quoted at the launch of the brand's 2015 global campaign.⁹

Read from a brand perspective, the shared roots explain a pattern that might otherwise look like coincidence. Two rivals speak about exploration and the protection of wild places in similar terms because they began in the same circle of climbers in the 1960s, and one of them was led for 14 years by the woman who later married the other's founder. For The North Face in particular, the story supplies a founder narrative that its own communication has never needed to tell.