How Finance Bros Get Around the Patagonia Ban

In 2018, it was hard to turn a corner in Manhattan’s Financial District or Silicon Valley without running into a dude in a fleece Patagonia vest. He was carrying Sweetgreen and checking Robinhood on his phone. He bumped into you. He didn’t apologize.

Flash forward to Vest Season 2024 — all shoulder seasons are also shoulderless seasons — and the same guy is wearing the same “Midtown Uniform” and checking Coinbase. Not much has changed, which is notable mostly because everything was supposed to change. In 2019, Patagonia announced that it would no longer honor custom orders from corporate clients like, say, fintech startups or the Morgans (JP and Stanley). Patagonia drew a line in the sand: Only B Corps with demonstrable high social impact could bulk order the Patagucci. The company didn’t want to participate in any greenwashing. 

Men’s Better Sweater Fleece Vest

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Patagonia’s signature fleece vest comes in four neutral colors and a bright teal, for some reason, but the Stonewash color pictured here is the classic look. It has a roomy fit that layers well over a button-down shirt and is made with 100% recycled polyester.

At the time, it seemed like the end of an era, but the thing about finance folks is that they understand the world in terms of markets. Kill one market, you almost always create a new one. And that’s what happened. Nowadays finance firms don’t announce their intentions….

1. Buy blanks then add a logo themselves after receiving the shipment.
2. Ordering straight from customization companies that stock Patagonia goods. 

Patagonia obviously isn’t a fan of this. And there are several reasons. Optics, clearly, are part of it. But so is fabric. The company claims that “adding an additional non-removable logo reduces the lifespan of a garment, often by a lot, for trivial reasons.” Performancewear is the brand’s meat and potatoes so this kind of makes sense, but… not really. It’s pretty clear there was a clash of vibes.

That clash is a bit weird for the fully vested. They are wearing a garment made by a company that is open in its contempt for what they do. But a lot of the persistent buyers don’t care. SPY spoke to one software engineer at a major investment firm — he asked that his name and company be kept private — tells SPY that following Patagonia’s move, he was utterly shameless about buying blanks. He pointed out that other brands, notably Marine Layer and Storm Creek, now target the finance crowd, but he preferred Patagonia, the genuine blackish market artifact. 

Ultimately this means that Patagonia’s attempt to divest from finance just enriched other companies — notably Threadfellows, a company that sells logo’d apparel. Place an order for the blank on the website and upload a logo. Done and dusted. Will Patagonia dam up Threadfellows’s order flow? Hard to say, but probably unlikely. Both companies declined SPY’s request for comment. Both companies sell the blank vest for $119.