Patagonia asks some employees to relocate to hub cities, including Pittsburgh

Patagonia asked about 90 of its remote employees to relocate within 60 miles of one of the brand’s seven hub cities — including Pittsburgh — or leave the company.

Patagonia’s sole Pennsylvania location is its store on Walnut Street in Shadyside.

J.J. Huggins, public relations and communications manager at Patagonia, said prior to the pandemic, the company’s entire customer experience team was based in Reno, Nev., which is the site of Patagonia’s North American distribution center.

Customer experience employees “are the folks that you either call or chat with online or email when you have a question for Patagonia,” he said. “These are the folks who know the brand inside and out.”

After Patagonia’s facilities reopened after the pandemic, the only team that remained remote was its customer experience team.

“It’s been helpful for our business to have our customer experience employees spread out across the country,” Huggins said. “We cover all the different time zones, so we’re more available when customers are contacting us.”

However, he said Patagonia has been piloting a program for the past year where all customer experience teams will be concentrated to seven city hubs, or key locations for the business: Reno, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Atlanta — and Pittsburgh.

“It allows the employees in those locations to gather together for trainings, for teambuilding activities, so they can interact with other Patagonia employees,” Huggins said.

The program has gotten good feedback from employees in those hubs, he said.

Patagonia announced internally on June 25 that all customer experience employees would be required to relocate to within 60 miles of one of the seven hubs. Huggins said employees were given until June 28 to decide.

“We had 255 customer experience employees at that time,” he said. “Of that, there were 90 employees who lived outside of those hub locations, so a vast majority of the team is already located within 60 miles of a hub city.”

The relocation package for the 90 affected employees was $4,000, paid time off to move and additional assistance, according to Huggins.

“It’s totally reasonable to not pack up and move to a different city,” he said of the feasibility of the decision.

Huggins clarified that once the employees relocate, they will still work remotely, as they are not required to work in an office. The relocation will allow them to attend in-store events, he said.

“We assumed — and I’ll say correctly — that most employees could make that decision very quickly, and that has turned out to be the case,” Huggins said. “We gave them a deadline and a quick deadline, but we were also going to be reasonable as well.”

For customer experience employees who weren’t able to make the decision in three days, Patagonia is working with them to come up with a solution, he said.

Those who decided to forgo the relocation were given a severance package, according to Huggins, which included health care, a stipend for technology, career support services, wages and their bonuses.

“Some chose to relocate and others chose severance,” he said.

Patagonia will not release the number of employees who took each route, Huggins said, for privacy reasons.

Prior to the required relocation, he said the customer experience team was 200-300% overstaffed, as Patagonia had needed to hire more people during the pandemic.

“We knew by making this decision, we knew we would lose people because of this, and as a result, we’re still fully staffed.”