Douglas Tompkins

Douglas Rainsford Tompkins (March 20, 1943 – December 8, 2015) was an American businessman, conservationist, outdoorsman, philanthropist, filmmaker, and agriculturalist.

He founded the North Face Inc, co-founded Esprit and various environmental groups, including the Foundation for Deep Ecology and Tompkins Conservation.

Tompkins was born in Conneaut, Ohio on March 20, 1943, the son of an antiques dealer and decorator.

He spent the first few years of his life in New York City before his family moved to Millbrook, New York.

He graduated from Indian Mountain School, a pre-prep school in Lakeville, Connecticut, in 1957.

In his senior year at Pomfret School in Connecticut, Tompkins was expelled for various minor infractions.

He returned to his hometown in Millbrook, but did not graduate from high school.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, he and Susie Tompkins Buell (née Russell), his first wife, co-founded and ran two companies: the outdoor equipment and clothing company The North Face and the Esprit clothing company.

Tompkins spent the years between 1960 and 1962 ski racing and rock climbing in Colorado, Europe, and South America.

In 1963, Tompkins founded the California Mountaineering Guide Service.

It was during this time he met Susie Russell, a casino employee who gave him a lift while hitch-hiking to Lake Tahoe.

They married in 1964 in San Francisco.

In 1964, Tompkins borrowed $5,000 from a bank to found The North Face, Inc., in San Francisco, as a mail order and retail company, selling rock climbing and camping equipment.

The early years set the design standard of sleeping bags, backpacks, and mountaineering tents.

Tompkins designed tents that were some of the first to avoid a pole in the middle, by using bendable rods threaded through exterior sleeves instead.

This design also increased the strength of the tent because the domed shape allowed the wind to roll over it.

These tents have been widely copied throughout the world.

In 1966, the first The North Face store was opened; the band The Grateful Dead played at the grand opening.

Two years later, Tompkins sold out his stake to Kenneth "Hap" Klopp for $50,000, using the profit to join his wife in co-founding Esprit, a fashion house.

Tompkins sold The North Face with the intention of a focus on adventure film making.

In 1968, Tompkins headed off on a six-month road-adventure trip from California to Patagonia, along with Yvon Chouinard, Dick Dorworth, and Chris Jones (calling themselves the "Fun Hogs"), who made the third ascent of Mount Fitz Roy in Patagonia in 1968.

They put up a new route on Mount Fitzroy, and - together with filmmaker Lito Tejada-Flores, who also made the ascent - made an adventure film, Mountain of Storms, about their experience.

In 1968, Tompkins, his wife Susie, and her friend Jane Tise began selling girls dresses, which they had planned on the kitchen table, out of the back of a VW bus.

In 1971 they incorporated the booming business under the name "Plain Jane", which later became Esprit.

By 1978, sales topped $100 million a year and the company had formed partnerships in Germany and Hong Kong.

Tompkins appointed himself "image director", developing his own marketing approach: overseeing all aspects of the company's image, from store design to catalogue layout, while his wife served as design director.

Emerging as one of the hottest brands of the era, the company grew into a transnational company operating in 60 countries.

Growing increasingly concerned about the ecological impacts of the fashion industry, Tompkins decided to leave the business world in the late 1980s.

Following their divorce and Tompkins' departure from the business world in 1989, he became active in environmental and land conservation causes.

In 1989, the Japanese art publisher Robundo published Esprit, the Comprehensive Design Principle (ISBN 4947613203), which documented the all-encompassing design principles that Tompkins had created for the brand.

In 1989, he sold his share of the American company back to Susie, from whom he had separated, putting most of his profits into land conservation.

Subsequently, in 1989 and 1994, he sold his interests in the other Esprit entities around the world.

After selling his interest in Esprit, Tompkins turned his efforts toward southern Chile, where he had spent much time climbing, kayaking, and skiing, to focus on land conservation and environmental activism.

In the 1990s Tompkins and his second wife, Kris McDivitt Tompkins bought and conserved more than 2 e6acre of wilderness in Chile and Argentina, exceeding that of any other private individuals in the region, thus becoming among the largest private land-owners in the world.

The Tompkinses were focused on park creation, wildlife recovery, ecological agriculture, and activism, with the goal of saving biodiversity.

He had assembled and preserved the land which became the largest gift of private land to any South American government.

Due to this, he was posthumously naturalized Chilean.

The 2010 film 180 Degrees South: Conquerors of the Useless describes a modern-day recreation of this journey and also highlights the conservation work on which Tompkins had been working.

Tompkins also became a skilled whitewater kayaker, claiming first descents of rivers in California, Africa, and South America.

In addition, he was a skilled bush pilot.