We want these clothes to tell stories, and collect stories, and we want to people to share those stories. We don't want you to just toss out that jacket because the zipper's broken. And we have a whole program around repairing things.

So, hopefully everyone's Patagonia is considered that way. I don't think we've thought that far into this, but I think it also reinforces one of our core values, which is that we actually, all the products that we make, we want to change the relationship that people have with their clothes, and create this real culture of ownership.

Well, I would love to think that these might end up in the American History Smithsonian Museum one day, alongside an 'I Like Ike' button. So, I'm curious to know how you feel about having put something like that into the canon alongside the 'I Like Ike' buttons of the world. Depending on whether or not the company makes more, I'd venture to guess that every single pair of these shorts is going to be considered a collector's item. And then of course, when it was reinforced-it was spelled out in his letter-it gave them the permission to insert it on the tag. Our design team, they heard it two years ago, and when he said that, we made those shirts. And he really spelled out in a postscript of the note, 'Remember, vote the assholes out.' All those politicians who don't believe we should do anything about climate change. He wrote a letter to that group earlier this year. We use that to fund thousands of grassroots environmental organizations. But also our founder wrote a letter to the 1% For The Planet community, which is the organization that he helped found, and is a very big part of the relationship that we have to our products-when you buy our product, 1 percent of sales goes to this organization. You can find some examples of T-shirts that we never sold, but that were made that say, 'Vote the assholes out.' I think you can find them on eBay or something like that now. Well, so here's the thing though: The saying, 'Vote the assholes out,' we've been saying that at Patagonia for a few years. I wanted to ask you if there was any hesitation about the specific use of the word “assholes,” but if you only found out once the design team had done it, I suppose you wouldn't actually know how that conversation went. The 'Road to Regenerative' shorts with the tags are, for the moment at least, entirely sold out. At least if we are, I haven't heard that decision. We haven't made a decision yet on if we're making more. Unfortunately, we're already sold out of them. That is the first question that just about everybody has asked, 'Is this real?' And yeah, they're very real. I need them in a size 32.' But it's been really fun to watch people discover the tag. But when we found out about them-when I found out about them, and a couple of my other colleagues in Ventura-I was like, 'Let's see who finds them, and let the world find it on its own.' I will say, when our founder found out about them, Yvon Chouinard, his response was, 'These are great.

And I don't know exactly when the shorts would have arrived in Reno, which is where our distribution center is. This was not a two-years-ago marketing strategy. This was the work of our very smart and creative design team. How did the tags come to be? And when the shorts actually hit the market? Were they out there for a while and people just didn't notice it? A condensed and edited version of our conversation is below. How exactly did that tag make its way onto a batch of Patagonia's 'Road to Regenerative' shorts? How long was it out in the wild before it was discovered? Who gave the go-ahead? So I called up Corley Kenna, the Ventura, California-based brand's director of global communications and public relations, to talk about clothing tags, assholes at the very top of the ballot, still more assholes down-ballot, and what we can all do to get them all out of office this November. Patagonia's 'Vote the A**holes Out' Tags Are Realīut I still had questions.

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