FLYING HIGH
CANADA GOOSE SPREADS ITS WINGS, OPENING A STORE IN LONDON AND BOOSTING ONLINE PRESENCE.
TORONTO • Canada Goose will open its first standalone store outside of North America with a new location in London as the outerwear giant makes an expanded ecommerce push into Europe.
The Toronto- based purveyor of luxury parkas and accessories is opening a 4,300-square foot location in London this fall and a second U.S. store, a 3,100-square foot boutique in Chicago.
The company is also adding seven new European countries to its roster of ecommerce sites: Austria, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, all markets where the manufacturer sees ample demand, according to chief executive Dani Reiss.
“The Swedish royal family started wearing our product ten years ago,” Reiss said in an interview from the company’s Toronto office. “Sweden will always have a special place in our hearts and we do well there.”
The news comes two months after Canada Goose’ s $340 million initial public share offering at $ 17. Its shares spiked after debuting in March on the TSE and closed at $ 23.50 Wednesday.
Canada Goose’s expansion comes as the U.S. gr apples with the highest level of store closures and bankruptcies since the 2008 recession. But Reiss, whose grandfather, Sam Tick, founded the manufacturer in 1957, says the company will be highly conservative with its store-based retail strategy, with plans to open 15 to 20 stores around the world by the end of 2020.
“There are some macrolevel challenges in retail these days,” Reiss said. “We are not looking to put stores in every corner of every city. We look for really key, iconic, sought- after locations around the world. There are some good opportunities out there right now, for sure, but coveted locations are covet- ed locations — they are still hard to get.”
Canada Goose found its groove in the l ate 1990s when Reiss began to market its parkas as a luxury product in Europe. Success with the big-spending snowsports and fashion- loving crowd in Europe helped to transform the coat’s image at home in Canada.
While Canada Goose has one store each in New York and Toronto, its e-commerce division, which launched in North America in 2014 and in the U.K. and France last year, has proved to be a stunning growth engine for the company, now accounting for 23 per cent of its annual sales.
That compares with its retail vendors’ online sales average of eight per cent, analyst Christian Buss of Credit Suisse said in a report last month. The analyst was bullish about Canada Goose’s “e- commerce- first” strategy amid a period of struggle for many legacy bricks-and-mortar retailers.
“Canada Goose’s positioning as a functional brand pro- vides some key advantages, the biggest of which are long product lifecycles of three to five years, versus fashion brands at 90 days, and an incredibly loyal customer base who buys first for function and lifestyle and second for fashion,” said Buss.
“This allows for high returns on marketing and product i nvestment and leads to lower-demand volatility than for traditional fashion brands.”
Canada Goose, which had annual revenue of $ 290.8 million in its last fiscal year, has had a compound annual growth rate of 38 per cent over the last three years with net income growing at a rate of 196 per cent in the same period.