Patagonia’s New CEO Plots a Post-Trump Future for the Activist Brand

The leader of the retailer that did more than any other to #ResistTrump wasn’t watching the around-the-clock coverage of the election results on cable news. That’s because Ryan Gellert, the new chief executive officer of Patagonia, doesn’t own a television.

When he took over the company this year, it was already at war with Trump. To try to unseat Republicans, Patagonia had bought political ads and employees had pumped cash into congressional races. That weekend in November, his phone blew up with texts from friends and colleagues across North America and Europe as he watched President-elect Joe Biden’s victory speech from his home in the Netherlands. Gellert felt a wave of relief, then sat down to compose a message to his employees. He told them to celebrate. “It was like taking a lot of big bricks out of your backpack as you’re trudging uphill,” he recalls in an interview with Bloomberg Green.