His friends say it makes perfect sense, this transition from the fashion world to saving the world. All the pieces were there for years, hiding in plain sight. Still, none of them—in some ways, not even Tompkins himself—saw it coming. The metamorphosis of the CEO of Esprit fits only in hindsight, as a journey that mirrors the changing priorities, assumptions, and points of view at the heart of many executives’ and corporations’ greener thinking in the twenty-first century—the principal difference being that Esprit’s chief image maker got there twenty years ahead of the pack.
Douglas Tompkins grew up in the village of Millbrook, New York, a Hudson Valley enclave of tree-lined roads, rolling green pastures, and large homes with horse barns and plenty of land. His ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. In 1943, when Tompkins was born into a world at war, Millbrook was already known for its moneyed inhabitants, understated country elegance, and walled estates. Today it is one of the wealthiest towns in New York state, and such diverse figures as Jimmy Cagney, Mary Tyler Moore, Katie Couric, and Timothy Leary (the apostle of LSD) have called it home.
Tompkins’s mother was a decorator and his father was in the antique business—high-end, appointment-only antique dealing, which involved combing the region for museum-quality pieces and works of art in a private plane and seeing clients in their homes and galleries. If Doug Tompkins’s flashes of warmth and gentleness, as well as his deep attraction to forests and nature, come from his soft-spoken mom, his most obvious trait—stern certitude—comes from his dad. A tough, demanding, tasteful man with a sharp eye for quality and style, the elder Tompkins expected no less from his sometimes unruly son. He presented young Doug, age ten, with a book that explained how to distinguish between good and bad specimens of Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture—and he expected the boy to read and discuss it.
The son may have inherited the father’s eye for design and style, but the antique dealer’s traditionalist views and sense of order were another matter. The respected boarding school his parents chose for his high school years—Connecticut’s Pomfret School, whose students would include another future eco baron, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—could not contain Tompkins. The headmaster expelled him in his senior year for rule-breaking and rebelliousness when he failed to come back after a weekend—for the tenth time. “I wasn’t great on heeding authority,” Tompkins says now, shrugging at the memory. “I’m still not too good at that.”1
At age seventeen, at the dawn of the 1960s, he gave up on high school, taking off for Colorado to ski bum, mountain climb, and go “adventuring,” as he calls it. The outdoors mattered to him most: He had started rock climbing when he was twelve in the Shawangunk Mountains, a favorite New York spot for climbers seeking a challenge, and by fifteen he was skiing and climbing mountains during family trips to Wyoming. In Aspen, he waited on tables and worked in ski shops, taking two jobs at a time during the seasonal holiday crunch, squirreling away all his money, saving for his next journey, passing himself off as older, relishing being on his own. The tips were good, but even better were the free staff lodgings, meals, and ski passes, which meant his expenses hovered near zero and the slopes were wide open to him.
After a year spent in Colorado hoarding cash, he took off for Europe, where he first climbed the Alps. Then he traipsed through the Andes in South America, making his first visit to Patagonia. Even then, eighteen and heedless, he recognized the rain forests of Chile and Argentina as special places, and he was in no hurry to leave. He stretched his money by hitchhiking, camping, and eating next to nothing while roaming the landscape. When his money finally gave out, forcing him back to the states to find more work, he did not settle back in Aspen. It was 1962, John Kennedy was the president of an America not yet tainted by assassination or Vietnam or Kent State or Watts. Where else would a young man from back East with no ties and no plans beyond making a run at the U.S. Olympic ski team go but California? He put out his thumb and headed west.
He landed on the outskirts of Tahoe City, where he found plenty of work at the ski resorts during the snowy season as a trail and mountain guide, leading to his first business venture, the California Mountaineering Service. During the summer he worked in construction or as a tree topper, taking down the big Douglas firs that were interfering with power lines and summer homes. Because the trees were so large and so close to houses, chopping them at the bottom was out of the question; tree toppers had to scale the trunks with cleats and harnesses and remove the tree piece by piece, working from the top down—difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming work, paying good money for a high school dropout.
Hitchhiking home from a job one summer day, Tompkins watched as a vivacious twenty-year-old with a blond ponytail pulled over and opened the door of her Volkswagen. Susie Russell peered out at the wiry, dark-haired Tompkins, discerning a certain rugged charm about him, though in those days, she would have offered a ride to just about any hitchhiker—everybody did back then. She was working that summer as a keno girl at the Nevada Lodge, just over the state line, where she had used a phony ID to get around the casino age restriction of twenty-one so that she could run bets and winnings back and forth from the keno tables.
Tompkins climbed in and, while introducing himself, boasted that he was a Harvard man. Russell was attractive and smart and Tompkins wanted to impress her, but he miscalculated. She had much more in common with Tompkins’s real résumé than with his imagined one. Her dad had been a well-known real estate developer and San Francisco’s betting commissioner back in the day of legal gambling parlors. Her mother, an artist, had complained about her headstrong daughter’s embrace of the counterculture and her lack of interest in college. Susie went to several top private and public high schools in San Francisco but she, like Tompkins, left high school without her diploma: Her principal at Lowell High School said she would not be welcome at graduation because she had been “too wild” at the prom. So the lie about Harvard didn’t gain Tompkins any traction—quite the opposite. Who needs a pretentious lumberjack? Susie asked, suggesting he could hop out of the car then and there. But he shook his head, and she dropped him where he wanted to go.
“He seemed so arrogant!” Susie recalls more than forty years later. “Still, there was something about him. He was unique. You couldn’t miss that. Maybe we were attracted to each other’s uniqueness. Neither of us wanted ordinary lives.”
In a bigger city, that ride probably would have been the end of the story. But Tahoe was small, and it turned out they moved in the same circles. They both skied, they both craved adventure, they both resisted conformity—and they kept bumping into each other in stores, at parties. One time he hit her up for a sixty-dollar loan, and she said OK, scraping together her precious tip money and handing it over. He took this (correctly) to be a good sign.
Gradually they became better acquainted, two strong personalities who were not afraid to butt heads—each was the sort that enjoyed a bit of conflict, and even thrived on it. One day, without prelude, Tompkins suggested, “Let’s go down to Mexico.” This was what Tompkins has always been good at, his friends recall: He could make the sudden impulse to drop everything and embark on a new adventure sound not outlandish, but irresistible. This is why people were drawn to Tompkins—you never knew what might be in store, where he might suddenly disappear for months at a time, or whether you might disappear with him. Impulsively, Susie said yes, she would come along.
They spent weeks tooling around Mexico in a VW microbus, both up for anything, surprised at how easy it was to be together, until suddenly all of autumn had slipped by, she could no longer imagine being apart, and Doug proposed. They were just winging it, two kids feeding each other’s souls, as Susie later described the time. She said yes.
They worked another season in Tahoe—ski patrol, waiting tables, doing pretty much anything to make money. By 1963, they were ready to head to San Francisco, the place Susie knew and loved best, their relationship already assuming what would become a permanent pattern: passionate conflict, passionate reconciliation, and long months apart as Doug continued adventuring and training for an Olympic tryout—marriage and kids (soon enough) notwithstanding. This was the deal going in: They would have full lives together, and full lives apart. Susie knew she was not acquiring the sort of husband who came home every day at five, nor did she want one who did.
Even before the move from Tahoe, Tompkins had fallen in with a crowd of hotshot climbers who were in the midst of creating what would later be referred to as the “golden age” of climbing in Yosemite National Park—blazing new routes up the park’s most difficult (and in many cases, unconquered) summits, hanging out beyond their two-week camping passes, then dodging park rangers who wanted them to clear out. Some of the world’s best climbers congregated at Yosemite back then, claiming the park’s Camp 4 as their domain and headquarters. They were nicknamed the “Valley Cong”—the guerrilla climbers. They saw themselves as creating a new aesthetic for climbing that emphasized style, and they took pride in the fact that there was absolutely no economic benefit to climbing. It was pure. It was outside society. It was an adrenaline-charged, risk-taking endeavor, different every time. And it was a unique way of looking at the world and at achievement.
Tompkins befriended and started climbing and surfing with one of the Valley Cong’s leaders, Yvon Chouinard, a southern California rock rat whom Tompkins, then fifteen, had first met in 1958 when he was climbing in the Shawangunks. Chouinard, five years older, was making a name for himself by climbing a series of peaks in Yosemite without the aid of ropes and without the time-consuming “siege tactics” applied by earlier generations.
Despite their climbing skills, Chouinard’s and Tompkins’s first adventure together was almost their last: a climb in 1962 up the north face of Mount Temple in the Canadian Rockies, an 11,624-foot peak in Banff National Park known for its treachery. At that time, its north face had never been scaled. Halfway up, as they camped on an exposed snowfield, bad weather arrived. They were vulnerable to wind-induced rock and snow avalanches, and Tompkins suggested they get out, even if it meant a harrowing climb down in darkness. They made it off the mountain by dawn, just in time to watch a rock slide explode onto their abandoned campsite. They’ve been best friends ever since, more than forty years, adventuring together on every continent, including Antarctica.
Chouinard saw in Tompkins the kind of informed fearlessness that makes a great climber and adventurer—and, as it turns out, a successful businessman: a willingness to leap, married to a certainty that you would reach the other side. “Fearless” was a word Tompkins has long used to describe how he wants to live, an expression of his two long-standing obsessions: going “where the ordinary human doesn’t go,” and being “world-class” at whatever he attempts to do. It’s the difference between simply breathing versus inhaling so deeply your lungs feel about to burst, he once observed. His wife Susie put it less metaphorically: “Doug is always trying to outperform himself.”
Chouinard, in turn, was an inspiring figure to Tompkins: tough, good-humored, supremely competent, inventive, outspoken. Around the time of Tompkins’s move to California, Chouinard was in the process of reinventing climbing gear with a secondhand forge, an old anvil, and metal he had salvaged from old harvester blades. It was a little business, Tompkins saw, but it was genius—because no one else had thought to do it.
Back then, climbers hammered pitons into rock walls for support as they moved upward. Most pitons were made of soft iron; they were used once and left behind. But climbing the sheer rock faces of Yosemite and similar vertical mountain faces called for hundreds of piton placements—one-use pitons were impractical. So Chouinard taught himself to be a blacksmith and made his own hard steel pitons out of old stovepipes and other junkyard scrap, which he tested out on some of the earliest ascents of Yosemite’s Lost Arrow Chimney and Sentinel Rock. Pretty soon other climbers heard about the Valley Cong’s mountaineering blacksmith and began demanding his pitons, which he sold for $1.50 apiece out of the back of his rattling old car.
Chouinard traveled the country in this way, climbing, surfing, making and selling his scrap-metal pitons, and working summers as a guide in Wyoming, where a young broadcast journalist and future network anchorman, Tom Brokaw, became his climbing student and friend. The rest of the year Chouinard survived solely on the meager income from his piton sales, running so low on funds at one point that he had to live off a very inexpensive case of dented cans of cat food he bought at a surplus store, supplemented by the occasional squirrel. He’d haul his anvil out on the beach after a few hours in the water and pound out more pitons, earning a few more bucks. He invented another, extremely small piton he called the “realized ultimate reality piton” (RURP), which soon became state of the art in rock climbing, and his financial outlook began to look better. By 1965, there was enough demand for Chouinard’s climbing gear that he and a partner replaced his anvil-in-a-car manufacturing setup with a blacksmith shop in Ventura, California, in an old building with corrugated steel walls: Chouinard Equipment. They offered a spectrum of redesigned and improved tools for serious devotees of rock, mountain, and ice climbing.
Around the same time Chouinard decided climbing gear needed to be reinvented, Tompkins was feeling similarly inspired by a lack of high-quality, lightweight, readily available camping gear for climbers and serious outdoorsmen—expedition-grade sleeping bags, tents, packs, and other portable equipment. So the Tompkinses started importing and selling the equipment, including Chouinard’s gear, mostly out of their car at climbers’ camps and parks, cash and carry. They supplemented their income with another business, Recreation Unlimited, a kind of summer adventure camp for boys. Tompkins, sometimes with Susie in tow and other times on his own, would haul kids on climbing, hiking, and camping getaways throughout California and Mexico. They advertised in Sunset magazine, and in those innocent days, unburdened by licenses, regulation, or massive liability insurance policies, they would persuade parents to send kids off for outdoor adventures with Doug the Mountain Man.
It was a modest business and their budget was always tight, but then a new opportunity arose: a friend with a ski shop in the Bay Area told them the business was failing and he was going to close down. The Tompkinses offered to rent the space to set up a store for their climbing and camping equipment. They borrowed $5,000 and in 1964 started The North Face, a mail-order and retail company, located in San Francisco’s North Beach area, across the street from beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s legendary bookstore, City Lights. Tompkins chose the name because the north face of any mountain above the equator is usually the coldest and most difficult to climb—as he and Chouinard had experienced firsthand on Mount Temple. The logo was a stylized drawing of Half Dome at Yosemite, a favorite of the Valley Cong.
Tompkins stocked high-end mountaineering and camping equipment he bought wholesale from Europe, as well as Chouinard’s technical climbing gear, the two entrepreneurs combining forces and helping each other’s business grow. At the time, North Beach was a mix of music, culture, and the occasional topless club, where Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and Jefferson Airplane were neighborhood regulars and the Tompkinses bought their first house. The North Face store stood out in this setting; the aesthetic that would later shine through at Esprit got its start with the store Tompkins designed, dominated by large photo murals of mountains, forests, and snowfields, along with the clean, natural wood counters and floor. A huge Ansel Adams print, borrowed from a local printer where it had been rolled up and collecting dust, covered one wall. The other walls were paneled with gorgeous distressed redwood that Doug had retrieved by driving up to the chicken farms that once prevailed in the northern California town of Petaluma, where he volunteered to tear down residents’ aged, disused chicken coops and haul away the wood. The effect was sophisticated and attractive; the sparse selection of merchandise, though high quality, was almost a sideshow. The emphasis was on where you would go and how you would feel with that equipment, what it was like to be in the mountains or hanging from some vertical slab of rock—everything was filtered through Doug Tompkins’s sensibilities. He had an instinct for creating a compelling image, something that comes naturally, perhaps, to climbers, who tend to project a very definite image of themselves.
When The North Face store opened for business, the owners offered glasses of wine and live music. A hot new local band played for the customers and guests: The Grateful Dead.
The North Face’s merchandising formula was novel for the times, but it worked. Interest in rock climbing, camping, and the outdoors was exploding during the 1960s. The new business made money from the start—not a fortune, but still profitable.
By then, the Tompkinses had two young daughters, Quincey and Summer (the latter so named, Susie says, because she was born on the first day of 1967’s “summer of love,” the zenith of the hippie movement). Neither the business nor his expanding family deterred Doug from taking off for months-long adventures—it was something he said he had to do.
Of all his adventures, one stands out—the one that he and Yvon Chouinard still talk about the most, and that seemed to mark a turning point for both men, launching them on entirely new trajectories in their careers and their lives. This was their six-month climbing, driving, and filmmaking odyssey to Patagonia in 1968. Chouinard has called it his most enjoyable adventure. Tompkins says it planted the seeds for the eco baron he was to become two decades later.
Like so many of their trips, this one began on a whim. Tompkins had come down from the Bay Area to Chouinard’s Ventura beach house for a day of surfing. As they lounged on the hot sand, Chouinard mentioned a book he had just read about the first ascent in 1952 of the frigid Mount Fitz Roy on the Argentine-Chilean border. The author described the climb as his best and most difficult; Fitz Roy had been scaled only once since then.
The two friends talked idly at first about the otherworldly silhouette of Fitz Roy, and what a great trip it would be; but of course they couldn’t do it—they both had young businesses in need of constant nurturing, they had obligations, they had family. But what a trip it would be. No harm in talking about it. Perhaps they could go in July. It would take a month. No, two months. Maybe four. Who else might come?
The idle wistful talk became frenzied and before they knew it, the sun was setting and they suddenly had a real plan. They would invite three other Funhogs—the successor group to the Valley Cong—and the trip would take six months. They’d begin in July, which is winter in South America, and work their way down the coast from one hemisphere to the next, driving all the way from California, surfing on the west coast of Central America and South America, gradually moving south until they hit snow, then switching to skiing for a month in Chile. They’d feast on whatever the local cuisine had to offer and drink whatever spirits were for sale, timing their trip to arrive at the mountain as spring came to Patagonia, sometime around October. They’d film a documentary of the entire trip, turning it all into one, big tax-deductible business venture. “Plans were piled on plans, fantasy on fantasy; by nightfall we had concocted the trip of trips,” Tompkins later wrote for the American Alpine Journal. “We were like boys who sneak into an ice cream shop to make themselves a gigantic sundae or banana split.”
The ski racer and essayist Dick Dorworth and the climber, skier, and photographer Lito Tejada-Flores piled into a van with Tompkins and Chouinard in California; the British climber Chris Jones rendezvoused with the group in Peru. On July 12, 1968, the group set out for the 16,500-mile drive to Patagonia, in an old Ford Econoline van crammed with climbing gear, packs, surfboards, wet suits for coldwater surfing in Peru, skis for the volcanic slopes of Chile, camping equipment, two movie cameras, several miles of 16-mm film, and a reel-to-reel tape deck with twenty-five hours of recorded Dylan, Beatles, Grateful Dead, and their collection of 1960s psychedelic rock favorites from San Francisco’s famous Fillmore Auditorium scene. Along the way, for three and a half months, they gorged on steak dinners; ran out of food and caught wild sheep to butcher and roast; dodged bandits in Cartagena, Colombia; and awoke while camping in Guatemala to find a group of soldiers surrounding them with guns drawn, demanding to see their passports, suspecting them of being from the CIA. It was a dangerous time in parts of Latin America, when revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, left-wing assassins, and right-wing death squads vied for supremacy, and covert American machinations were suspected everywhere—at times, justifiably so. “It was a really great dirtbag adventure,” Chouinard would later chortle, but at the time, it appeared to the scruffy young men that a few of those soldiers would have happily shot them in the head at the slightest provocation.
The creaking van finally reached the Patagonian pampas, the last leg of the trip, having survived a roadside rebuilding of the engine by Tompkins and Chouinard, followed by a sixty-mile-an-hour nighttime encounter with a herd of mules that appeared suddenly before them on a pitch-black road. Then one morning they saw Mount Fitz Roy looming before them, an impossibly tall, lone mountain rising up from the greens and browns of the Patagonian steppe, at once inviting and terrifying. No wonder, Tompkins muttered, only two expeditions had ever made it to the top.
After spending a month establishing camp and making slow, halting progress up the mountain, the group had to dig an ice cave 3,000 feet from the summit and wait out blizzards and high winds for four weeks, playing cards, telling stories, and interpreting each other’s dreams using Tompkins’s recent reading of Freud as a guide. They were forced to retreat periodically down the slope to their base camp to fetch more provisions for their wet and cramped ice cave—supplemented by the occasional sheep roast and a desperate 100-mile drive for additional supplies.
When the weather broke at last, Tompkins set the alarm clock an hour earlier and didn’t tell anyone, hoping to get his stiff, grumbling friends up and out while the clear skies held. In bitterly cold darkness they began to climb at two-thirty in the morning, using a new, untried route, reaching the cloud-shrouded summit at seven that night. They became only the third group of climbers ever to stand atop Fitz Roy, named for the captain of the famous HMS Beagle, on which Charles Darwin made his name as a world-class naturalist and was inspired to conceive the theory of evolution by natural selection. The Funhogs had set a new standard: Their “California Route” became the most repeated by subsequent climbers of Fitz Roy for decades to come.
After sixty days of trying to reach the top (of which only five days were spent actually climbing), the Funhogs spent all of twenty minutes on the summit. This is how climbers are: they stayed only long enough to exult, to catch their breath, and for Lito to shoot a few thousand feet of film. The joy was in getting there, not in being there—a pattern that would haunt Tompkins for many years, for ill and good. They climbed and rappelled back down in frozen darkness a short time later, for fear of being caught exposed as the next storm started rolling in. They made it down safely, slept all of the next day, then drove back to civilization, where they realized that Christmas had arrived and that it was time to celebrate.
The experience reinforced the connection Tompkins and Chouinard felt for this region even as it heightened their concerns that one of the world’s signature wilderness regions might be in jeopardy. Both men had noticed some disturbing signs that the natural beauty of Patagonia they had first experienced and admired eight years earlier was not quite the same this time around—forestland had been burned or cut down, and roads had been bulldozed through sensitive habitats. Tompkins griped that areas once lit only by starlight were now dotted with the electric glow of new developments. Progress, most people would call it—but Chouinard and Tompkins were not most people.
When they returned home, Chouinard embarked on a series of changes to his business. First, he decided that his popular hard iron pitons were causing too much damage to the environment—each time they were hammered and removed, the cliffs and rock faces were altered, and the experience for the next climber was diminished. So he developed new gear—aluminum chocks and wedges that could be placed and removed in cracks and crevices without the use of hammers and without causing the rock face to crumble, yet still serve climbers’ needs. He discontinued his hard steel pitons, even though they were his most profitable products, in favor of a new idea: “clean climbing.” Once again, he had reinvented his sport: clean climbing quickly became the preferred method for rock and mountain climbing everywhere.
The other big change for Chouinard came a few years after the trip, though it had been planned for some time: He started a new company to sell clothing for climbers and outdoorsmen—soft, comfortable, colorful, and warm, inspired by a rugby shirt he had picked up abroad. He and Tompkins had talked about what to name this new company; he wanted something just right, as magical and evocative as the mythical Shangri-la. But then they realized it was staring them in the face all along, an obvious choice: He would call his new company Patagonia. The emblem would be a stylized drawing of Mount Fitz Roy. Patagonia, which began with four employees, was destined to become one of the most successful and environmentally responsible sportswear companies in the world. (In 2006, it had annual revenues of about $260 million.)
Tompkins also returned to the United States primed for a change. He had taken on the role of director of the documentary film about their six-month trip, and he had put together what would become a cult climbing classic, Mountain of Storms, which focused on the ascent of Fitz Roy, along with a longer version about the whole trip, The Funhogs. Mountain of Storms won the grand prize in 1972 at the Trento Film Festival in Italy, which convenes annually to honor the world’s best mountain, adventure, and exploration films (that year the competition included films from the legendary marine explorer Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic). Mountain of Storms began making the rounds at college campuses, where it spawned something of a new American subculture of climbing and traveling—an adventure lifestyle that inspired innumerable treks around the world imitating the Funhogs. Hunter S. Thompson eventually appropriated the term to describe his style of covering political campaigns. In its own way, Mountain of Storms did for climbing and adventure road trips what the classic documentary Endless Summer did for surfing in 1966.
The mercantile world of The North Face seemed unacceptably mundane in comparison. Tompkins had climbed that retail mountain; who wanted to just hang around at the top? He griped to Susie and Chouinard that he was spending more energy talking to people about equipment than engaging in the sport itself. He realized his mistake, too late: It turned out he hated making a business out of his main hobby. Less than three years after founding The North Face, he sold it for $50,000, a tenfold return on his initial investment, and laid plans for a new career making adventure films. (The North Face would continue to grow into a popular brand of its own, changing hands several times and moving from specialty equipment to mass consumer clothes and products; it is now part of the VF Corporation’s $350-million stable of brands, which includes Vans and Jansport, accounting for half the backpacks sold in the United States.)
The filmmaking career was not to be. As Tompkins finished Mountain of Storms and started casting about for his next project, another opportunity arose to sidetrack him: his wife’s new business. When he had returned from his six-month Patagonian trip, he found that Susie had not simply waited at home with the kids. She and a friend, Jane Tise, who had worked at the ski shop before The North Face took its place, had started their own kitchen table business, the Plain Jane Dress Company. They had been making hippie-style, floral-patterned knit mini-dresses and marketing them to local stores. The office was the Tompkinses’ house, an arrangement that solved the problems of child care and the fact that they couldn’t afford extra rent.
They started with twelve dresses and showed them out of Susie’s old station wagon. Susie Tompkins’s gift, colleagues would later say, was a knack for spotting a trend before it was a trend: Everyone—specifically the masters of the consumer economy, teenage girls—loved the dresses. They were what Susie called “Londony”—snug, short, and sexy—and no one was selling anything quite like them in America. In short order, Susie and Jane found they barely could keep up with the demand from local boutiques. They took on a third partner to handle sales and soon Plain Jane clothes were in Macy’s—the promised land for any upstart clothing designer.
Doug began helping Susie part time with the business, and to his surprise, he became intrigued. Unlike The North Face, women’s fashion posed no conflict between business and pleasure for him. After being apart so much, he and Susie relished working together. And though fashion is of little interest to mountain climbers—Tompkins has been dressing in the same blue jeans and polo shirts since he was sixteen—the idea of building a business, a brand, and an image, and using that to turn some colorful fabric into a profit, sucked him in. He saw Plain Jane had a bit of magic to it, but the company was disorganized, lacking a coherent vision—it needed someone to handle its business, marketing, and image. Why not him, even if this meant making it up as he went along?
He offered to invest some of his earnings from selling The North Face to become a partner, and to work for a while getting the business end squared away. Then, he figured, he could return to filmmaking. But by the end of 1970, Plain Jane had developed a line of different labels with catchy names—Rose Hips and Jasmine Tees among them—and sales had reached $1 million a year. The kitchen table and station wagon weren’t cutting it anymore, and so Doug arranged the purchase of an old wine warehouse above a spice factory—the place smelled permanently of cumin and tarragon—where he set up a garment manufacturing operation and office space. The partners created an overarching company for all the separate labels, and called it Esprit de Corp. There was no turning back at that point. To Tompkins, the adventure of building an organization and pushing it to the top of an industry turned out, unexpectedly, to be as seductive in its own way as Fitz Roy had been: “After that,” he recalls, “it was twenty years of a wild ride.” They never expected their little family business to make them rich, he and Susie Tompkins say, but more money than they had ever dreamed of poured in.
By 1986, the company, its name shortened to Esprit and marked by the now famous, distinctive logo “E” made up of three parallel bars, had worldwide sales of $1.2 billion. Esprit was at the top of the fashion world.
Naturally, from the mountain climber’s been-there-done-that point of view, reaching the summit meant it was time for a change. Or time to leave.