Eco brand Patagonia looks to open Auckland waterfront base

Thursday, 13 November 2025

Outdoor clothing maker Patagonia is looking to open a store in Auckland, and is exploring leasing a heritage building in the waterfront Britomart retail, hotel and dining area.

Currently, Patagonia only has one retail store in New Zealand in Queenstown Tāhuna, but Cody Randell, Patagonia’s operations manager in New Zealand, said: “There’s aspirations to branch out into Tāmaki Makaurau.”

“We have got a lot of homework to do to make sure we show up in the right way, but we’ve been chatting with the team at Britomart, and there might be an opportunity in one of the heritage buildings down on the waterfront,” he said.

“We’re getting close, but there’s still a lot of work to be done,” he said.

In Queenstown, the Patagonia shop has been set up as a community meeting place for people involved in outdoor activities, especially fly fishing. The Queenstown store has a Flybar for local anglers to meet.

Patagonia has just released its global sustainability progress report detailing how it is attempting to create a company that makes a profit for the planet without ruining it.

The company is now owned by the not-for-profit Holdfast Collective and the Patagonia Purpose Trust, and all the money it makes is ploughed into for-good environmental projects, including helping fund pest control and trapping in the Rees Valley ahead of the release of Takahē into the wild.

The clothing company was founded in 1973 by climber Yvon Chouinard, who is now in his late 80s.

He gifted the company to the two trusts in 2022 as a way of ensuring the company’s profits were distributed toward saving the planet.

In the global progress report, Chouinard said: “The pursuit of short-term profit and mindless consumption are destroying the planet, and it is bad for most businesses.

“To put it into perspective, when Patagonia was founded in 1973, the average lifespan of an American company on the S&P 500 was around 30 years. Today, it’s less than 18.

“More companies are being bought up or hollowed out, and the population of billionaires is climbing. Entrepreneurial success went from building a durable business to selling it off to the highest bidder. It is not sustainable, yet it does not show signs of stopping any time soon.”

The report takes a swipe at the burgeoning billionaire oligarchy in the United States. It contains a photo of the door to Patagonia chief executive Ryan Gellert ’ office, emblazoned with a sign reading: “Every billionaire is a policy failure”.

Chouinard said: “Businesses must exist to do more than provide a good service or make a quality product, and they definitely need to exist to do more than enrich a handful of individuals. They can and should exist to solve problems.”

Many large companies now produce sustainability, climate and modern slavery reports, but Patagonia’s progress report is brutally frank about its own progress, with Gellert saying: “The last thing we wanted this progress report to be was page after page of self-congratulation.”

It said 95% of its products were now made in Fair Trade-certified factories which the Fair Trade global certification says “workers are paid a fair wage, work in safe conditions, have their rights respected, and their communities have the opportunity to prosper”.

Patagonia has also been championing the “right to repair” short-life products, particularly clothing, which are imposing a massive landfill imposte on countries like New Zealand.

But, the company’s report says “there’s plenty of contradictions we’re still working through. Like running the largest repair centre in North America, while about 85% of our products lack an end-of-life solution. Or nearly eliminating the use of virgin fossil fuels in our products, while some of the factories that make our gear still run on coal.”

Patagonia has also taken a stand on banking, saying:

“At one point, the emissions tied to our cash on deposit were likely greater than the emissions from all our operations in a given year. That’s because our banks were financing fossil-fuel projects like drilling new oil wells and digging mines.”

“Since 2018, we’ve moved most of our financing to a handful of large banks that can handle our global needs and are making steady progress on climate. We chose them because of the steps they are taking to move away from fossil fuels and their willingness to work with us.”

Randell said Patagonia banked with BNZ in New Zealand.

BNZ’s sustainability report said the bank would stop funding thermal coal mining (for electricity generation) by the end of 2025, and all remaining lending to coal mining (for things like steel production) by the end of 2030, and its 2030 target is to reduce lending to oil and gas industry.

Its Australian parent bank National Australia Bank has similar targets, but is the target of a campaign from the not-for-profit Australian Conservation Foundation to “truly ban funding to new gas and expansionary coal, oil and gas”.