Down smackdown: The North Face v Patagonia on ethical feather standards

For decades, The North Face and Patagonia have competed in the marketplace for outerwear, backpacks and pullovers. Now they’re engaged in a smackdown over down – specifically over which company has put forward the strongest standards to protect ducks and geese, whose feathers are made into down insulation, from cruel practices on farms and in slaughterhouses.

This month, The North Face announced that it would begin selling down next year that complies with its Responsible Down Standard (RDS), which it describes as “the broadest and most comprehensive approach to animal welfare available in the down supply chain”. Patagonia says that’s simply not so, and that its own Traceable Down Standard provides “the highest assurance of animal welfare in the apparel industry”.

Four Paws, an independent animal-welfare group that advocates for the ethical treatment of, agrees that Patagonia’s standard is superior. While The North Face standard is “a step in the right direction”, Patagonia has “a lower tolerance for a set of things that we think are important for animal welfare”, says Nina Jamal, an international farm animal campaigner for Four Paws, which is based in Vienna.

The fact that these two longtime rivals are competing over corporate responsibility should come as no surprise. Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard, a celebrated rock climber, fly fisherman, environmentalist and author, has made his company a sustainability pioneer. And after Doug Tompkins, The North Face’s founder, left the company decades ago, he went on to acquire vast amounts of wilderness for conservation in Chile and Argentina and publish a book assailing factory farms. In 1968, Chouinard and Tompkins, who were then pals, took a celebrated road trip to Patagonia.

Down, as it happens, is a high-performance product made from waste. No one raises ducks or geese for their feathers; they are bred and raised for meat, mostly in eastern Europe and China, and feathers are a byproduct. Down insulation is prized because it has a higher warmth-to-weight ratio than synthetics, which come from petroleum, and it is more compressible.

The trouble is, waterfowl raised for meat are subjected to a couple of controversial practices. Their feathers are “live-plucked”, which activists say causes “bloody wounds as the animals shriek in terror”. Ducks and geese also are force-fed to fatten their livers to make foie gras, as producers shove pipes down their throats to stuff them with more food than they would consume on their own.

Neither Patagonia nor The North Face buy directly from farmers or slaughterhouses. But after coming under attack from Four Paws, both companies set out to try to insure that the down that finds its way into their garments and sleeping bags did not result in animal cruelty. (See this 2011 blog post for a sterling example of self-criticism and transparency from Patagonia.) They dispatched sustainability executives – Wendy Savage of Patagonia, Adam Mott of The North Face – and suppliers to farms and slaughterhouses in eastern Europe and China to untangle their supply chains, which were complex and largely opaque.

Mott, a vegetarian who believes strongly in animal welfare, told me he found the visits a little unsettling. “I try to separate my personal feelings,” he said, and instead focus on what’s right from an ethical perspective for The North Face. Still, he acknowledged: “It was challenging to be at the farms and the slaughterhouses.”

Because there was no existing animal-welfare standard for waterfowl, The North Face set out to write its own, as did Patagonia. Both hoped to have broader influence. Patagonia’s Savage told me: “Our goal is always to influence the industry and other brands.” The outdoor apparel industry uses only a fraction of the world’s down, most of which goes into the bedding and home furnishings.

The competing standards have much in common. Both aim to source down only from birds that have never been live plucked or force fed. Both companies enlisted respected partners to inspect or certify farms: NSF International for Patagonia, Control Union for The North Face.

As North Face’s Adam Mott explains in this blog post, The North Face has pledged to source 100% Responsible Down by 2017 and has given its standard to the Textile Exchange, a respected nonprofit, in the hope of engaging more brands and down suppliers. For its part, Patagonia says (pdf) its down products will contain only 100% “traceable down” beginning this fall and that its standard also will be shared.

The differences between the standards are small but significant. Among them:

• North Face’s RDS permits a blend of certified and un-certified down in products that can be certified, although the company says that only products containing 100% certified down will carry a consumer-facing label.
  
• Patagonia’s standard reaches up to the so-called parent farms, where birds face the highest risk of live-plucking because they live longer. North Face’s rules do not, focusing instead on breeding farms.
  
• The North Face standard permits what is called “parallel production”, meaning that farms and slaughterhouses that produce certified down can also handle birds that have been force fed, so long as no down comes from the force-fed geese. This practice is banned by Patagonia.
  

“I’m worried about the RDS standard,” Nina Jamal of Four Paws told me. “But I’m told that they are trying to address our concerns.”

North Face’s Adam Mott and Anne Gillespie, who is director of industry integrity for Textile Exchange, say their standard will be strengthened as it is revised. Rules that are too tough from the outset might be spurned by industry, particularly those in the bedding business that have yet to be targeted by activists.

“We certainly wanted to protect as many animals as possible, and in our view, that would be best achieved by rapid and wide-scale adoption of the standard,” Gillespie said. “We don’t want perfection to be the enemy of the good.”

Both companies, meanwhile, are developing synthetic alternatives to down. But they say that pound for pound, nothing insulates as well as good down. It just goes to show that nature knows best.

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