At Patagonia Inc., success in the apparel business and doing the right thing advance hand-in-hand.
As the Ventura, California-headquartered retailer’s senior director of global logistics, Todd Soller, says he is humbled in his dream job, where efforts to save the planet are unabashedly embedded – and where he even gets to enjoy workplace quality time with his 3 1/2-year-old son.
Based at Patagonia’s service and distribution hub in Reno, Nevada, Soller embodies the core values of a company that, since emerging nearly a half-century ago as a supplier of climbing hardware, has become renowned as much for its activism as its top-quality products for outdoor enthusiasts.
Soller shares his gratifying journey with AJOT readers...
How is Patagonia’s dedication to social responsibility – with efforts such as last year donating its $10 million in tax cut savings to climate change awareness – proving beneficial?
At its root, we strongly believe in all of the causes we support, and we have a significant organization to work with small and large and grassroots environmental organizations.
We think, more than ever before, customers also want their purchase dollars to mean something, to stand for something. They really identify and connect with brands that care about things other than just their bottom line.
So we see it as a great alignment between who we believe we are as a company and what our customers also identify with. We think there’s a great connection there.
People expect us to be a leader in the field. They do notice that we’re very politically active. And the reality is it’s kind of proportional to what’s happening in the world today that we need to be involved if we care about social, environmental and climate change issues.
The elevation of big issues and standing up for our values is not driven by profit or marketing. We would be doing this anyway. It’s about us continuing our 45 years of advocacy as a company for wild places.
We’re not doing these things to connect with the customer. We connect with the customer because we’re doing these things, and we would do them anyway.
So how does that approach relate to the supply chain?
On our supply chain – and I’ll use the broad definition of supply chain moving all the way back from production through delivery to customer – it’s a desire and a real thirst to understand how our supply chain is behaving environmentally.
We know our product itself is one of the biggest impacts on the supply chain. That forces us to really consider how we can do responsible product manufacturing.
We have a goal by 2025 – and we’re well on our way – to use only renewable or recycled materials in our product. By fall of this year, almost 70 percent of the materials we use in our products will be recycled or renewable.
Obviously, there’s another angle to the supply chain, and that’s making sure we are doing the right thing for our partners and their employees. And it’s important that we make a product that our customers can feel good about, not only environmentally but socially.
We carry more Fair Trade-certified products than any other apparel brand out there, and we have incredibly rigorous environmental standards for our supply chain as a whole.
Looking at the supply chain from factory to our customers, we’re constantly examining the carbon footprint of our ocean and air transportation, what we do with our buildings – both partner buildings, like a third-party logistics provider, as well as our internally operated facilities, such as the one here in Reno – all the way through our transportation to the customer. It’s not just the transportation but also the packaging and all the associated energy use.
As far as production, transportation and distribution, we’ve set the goal of being carbon-neutral and hopefully carbon-positive across our entire business, including our supply chain, by 2025. That’s not just what Patagonia does, but it goes back to our farmers who produce the fibers we use, the mills that produce the fabric, the factories that produce the finished goods, transportation lanes, office and distribution and other facilities, and including our transportation partners.
Specifically, as far as programs at Patagonia distribution centers, what value is being realized by providing on-site child care at company facilities?
There are a lot of benefits. In fact, not only am I on the leadership team here in Reno, where we have one of our child development centers – the Truckee River Child Development Center – I’m also a parent. My oldest kid, who’s 3 1/2, goes to the Truckee River Child Development Center, and my two twins, who are about 2 years old, will be going there soon. So I think I view this from several perspectives.
Historically, we’ve been in the child care business for quite a while, with the center at our Ventura headquarters opened in 1983 and the one here in Reno opened in 2016.
We think it’s just the right thing to do for our working parents and their children. To have that ability to connect and go to work with Mom and Dad, not just get dropped off somewhere else, is incredibly important.
We see that come to life every day – before work, after work, at lunch, on a break – just those kind of intimate moments you can connect with your child for 10 minutes – to see what they’re doing with their day and to see the light come into their face when you walk into the room. My wife tells me she’s jealous I get to go see my son four or five times a day during work, because it’s just such a cool thing.
Apart from those amazing benefits to our staff and their children, there’s a business case as well. We recoup over 75 percent of the cost of the program through employee retention, productivity and tax advantages. This stat is even bigger: We’ve seen more than 98 percent of new mothers come back to work after their maternity leave.
That number is incredible.
Yes, it’s because Patagonia is an incredible place to work, but it’s also because we’re doing the right things to enable them to come back to work.
What role does your background – including more than 20 years with leading management consulting firm Kurt Salmon Associates, last as managing director before joining Patagonia in April 2018, and six years in the U.S. Navy, discharged as a lieutenant, as well as studies in mechanical engineering and architecture in earning your bachelor’s degree from the University of Arkansas – play in your leadership of Patagonia’s global logistics?
On paper it seems like, wow, how does that journey connect? But, for me, it’s always about being exposed to interesting problems and helping to solve those problems.
My interest in mechanical engineering and architecture really sprouted from looking at how things work and how we can make them better and advance the solutions to problems.
My time in the Navy was about applying those technical solutions and also giving me a good background in understanding people deeply and helping people to really use their skills and internal knowledge and external training to think about how they can solve those problems, both as individuals and as groups.
There’s also that incredible sense of accountability and responsibility that what each of us does matters and that, at the end of the day, we do need to look back and think about what we’re doing and what we’ve done and is that the direction we really want our world and our life to go in.
After the Navy, I had a really great opportunity to work at Kurt Salmon Associates, which is known, among other things, for logistics and distribution, specifically in apparel and retail fields. So 90 percent of my career at KSA was working initially in North America and then later in Japan and Europe to understand problems both at the country level and internationally and how to solve those.
My time at KSA was very implementation-oriented, including strategy and design and also implementation, whether it was building the distribution center from the ground up, implementing the material-handling systems, warehouse management systems, transportation systems, training people, ramping up and an ongoing continuous improvement.
I was always a Patagonia customer during my time at KSA, but I was also a consultant to Patagonia from about 2010. Patagonia was always my favorite client, based on the company mission, the product and the people. The chance to work at Patagonia is really a lifelong dream come true and an opportunity for me to contribute to the mission we have as a group.
You’re blessed to be working at something you truly love...
I know. It’s humbling. I’d say I’ve never had a bad day at work here. I’m happy to go to work in the morning. It’s exciting.
As a longtime customer and fan of Patagonia, I’ve always loved the product. I think one of the most humbling things for me since I’ve joined Patagonia is talking with people who are also customers and fans of the brand and the product and our mission and hearing them tell their stories about their connections with Patagonia.
It’s astounding. It’s honestly the most humbling feeling I’ve had in my professional career.
How, through its supply chain, is Patagonia meeting high customer expectations associated with being at the premium end of the apparel business?
The simple answer is that we’re a very service-oriented company in addition to having incredibly rigorous standards for our products that are set and reviewed by our founders on an every-season basis.
The question is what do we need to do to make this interaction right with our customer, not what’s the lowest-cost way I can handle this transaction. If that means taking more time on the phone with a customer or spending a little more to get a product out of the distribution center all the way to our repairs and returns program, via the Ironclad Guarantee, it’s an incredibly high focus on the customer experience with the product and the service level.
At the same time, we need to make sure we’re keeping cost in balance, but it’s not the first priority. The priority is around product quality, the great service experience and making sure our customers are happy with what they have.
What do you enjoy doing with your nonwork time?
My life is very busy right now with three young children. I have a son who’s almost 4, and then we have twins, a boy and a girl, who are 20 months old. So home is always very busy, always very hectic, but always a real joy.
My main outdoor connections are via hiking, and being in Reno is great being at the foothills of the Sierra [Nevada mountain range]. Skiing is another thing I love to do. Mountain biking is definitely a love in the summer.
I’ve found gardening is also fascinating to children. In the garden now, we have lettuce and radish, with sweet peppers, hot peppers and watermelon coming up, and then, hopefully, the cucumbers and squash are not far behind.
You could say we’re dabbling in lots of different plants.
It’s almost an unending source of entertainment and knowledge and education. We do that as a family, and it’s really a blast.
