Patagonia is a household name among outdoor enthusiasts. A brand committed to its mission to “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis,” they are a powerful force in the design field, sustainability movement, and business world, respectively. Most anyone in the outdoor industry would give an arm and a leg for a peek into the world of Patagonia, and it’s no surprise that that’s not an easy task; they accept only the best of the best out of over 9,000 applicants. But one student knew what she wanted and applied herself, working hard until her opportunity to intern for Patagonia came.
Veronica Villhard spent the summer of 2018 working as one of only sixteen interns at Patagonia’s home base in Ventura, California. While there she got the chance to work on a wide variety of projects, including kids, climbing, and mountain biking equipment. “One of my favorite ways to support designers was assisting with making mock ups. Exploring details of their design [in the] Forge prototyping facility was a great part of my day.” Her weeks were filled to the brim with meetings, designing, and of course, surfing the Golden Coast.
Whenever she had the chance, Veronica sought opportunities to familiarize herself with the many tools and facilities common to the outdoor industry. Luckily for her, she said “my advanced sewing classes taken through Outdoor Product Design and Development Program (OPDD) prepared me to quickly adapt to the sewing facilities and get to work on projects.”
Veronica is a transfer student from the Industrial Design Program in Kansas, a sometimes difficult transition to Logan and the OPDD Program at Utah State. But evidently her sacrifice and hard-work paid off, and “resulted in beautiful opportunity after opportunity to bring value to a company in the outdoor industry and work with increasingly incredible causes and people.”