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ROOTS TAKES MULTIBRANCHED BRANDING APPROACH

By Susan Thorne

The Roots brand will be even more visible now that the company has its own airline.

It’s a potent formula for retail success: Use a lot of national symbols and promote your brand ingeniously using high-profile celebrity endorsements, a variety of media and marketing avenues, and attractive merchandise.

That’s the approach that has paid off for Roots Canada Ltd., a dynamic Toronto-based leisurewear retailer with annual net sales of more than C$200 million, which has grown to 193 stores in Canada, the United States and Asia since its inception 26 years ago.

Roots taps into the special appeal of Canadian symbols such as the beaver (which is the company’s logo), the maple leaf, and the scarlet and white of the Canadian flag, all featured prominently in its product line. The company’s popular, good-quality sweatshirts, hats, jackets and other casual garments and footwear capitalize on consumer brand consciousness by featuring the Roots name prominently.

But Roots’ real competitive edge lies in its energetic building of the brand in several different directions at once.

Roots announced plans last May to launch a full-service airline, Roots Air, in partnership with Skyservice Airlines, a subsidiary of Canadian-owned Skyservice Investments. And, as of press time, the airline was expected to have begun its first flights by the end of March, nonstop between Toronto and Vancouver and Toronto and Calgary, according to published reports. By June, it is expected to add Montréal and Los Angeles to its routes. The brand will be highlighted throughout, from the beaver logo on plane fuselages and tails to Roots leather seating in business class. Plans call for Roots Air to serve eight major Canadian cities and selected U.S. destinations beginning with Los Angeles.

The new airline promises lower prices than other national carriers and multiclass service. It will serve meals on china, even in coach, called silver class, and attendants will wear uniforms by Tu Ly, a Canadian designer who also designs for the clothing line.

As official outfitter of the Canadian Olympic teams at Nagano in 1998 and Sydney last fall, Roots has benefitted from valuable media exposure of its branded clothing during the Games as well as spinoff sales of the same apparel in its stores.

The bright red “poor boy” hat sported by winter athletes at Nagano became a retail best-seller with more than 200,000 purchased in the wake of those Games, and this year’s podium sweatshirt in red with a white maple leaf promises to be a similar success. The arrangement with the Canadian Olympic Committee obliges Roots to provide outfits for the athletes and pay a flat fee plus a percentage of proceeds from sales of Olympic-themed merchandise; the latter amount goes directly to benefit athletes.

Another promotional tool is the celebrity “placement” featuring entertainment and sports personalities wearing Roots apparel in advertisements or at high-profile events.

Movie stars Matt Damon, Dan Aykroyd, Arnold Schwarzenegger and numerous others have participated, as have skateboard champion Ross Rebagliati and figure skater Elvis Stojko. Less official endorsements have come from figures such as British heir to the throne Prince William, who has been photographed wearing Roots garments.

The Canadian product theming makes Roots apparel a popular choice for tourists and other visitors; the federal government purchased Roots jackets as gifts for the 1998 participants in the APEC finance ministers’ meeting in Alberta, for example, and media coverage again brought Roots unsolicited publicity.

Roots is the Canadian Olympic team’s official outfitter.

Industry observers identify Roots as one of the country’s brightest retail lights. “They’ve wanted to make Roots a household word, and I think they have succeeded,” said Wendy Evans, president of Evans & Co., a Toronto retail consultancy. “When you look at Canada, they have really covered the gamut of distribution channels: They’re in the malls, in the power centers, in streetfront locations, and their merchandise is in the department stores. And they’ve been exceptionally clever with their branding of the Olympics.”

Roots has been vertically integrated since its inception, and has two factories producing 85% of the total product line, which includes almost 1,000 different items, according to Roots spokesman Raymond Perkins. A Roots Kids children’s line offers smaller-sized versions of adult Roots gear, and recent diversification is extending the brand into new retail market areas.

Three Roots Home stores have opened in Toronto and Montréal selling furnishings such as leather chairs, maple beds and fleece duvet covers. Roots Lodge, a holiday resort opened in 1999 in Ucluelet on Vancouver Island, B.C., showcases the Roots Home line and lifestyle in a scenic oceanside setting.

Roots has also branched out into a licensee program for sales and production of Roots watches, glasses, perfumes and other products, which are sold in their own and other retailers’ outlets.

A strength of Roots’ marketing efforts is its two founders, transplanted Americans Michael Budman and Don Green, who maintain hands-on contact with all aspects of the business.

Both men moved from Chicago to Toronto in the 1970s and collaborated in selling Roots-branded “negative heel” (backward-sloping) shoes for a brief time before the collapse of that trend and the launch of the first Roots casual wear lines.

Budman and Green’s networking and social contacts have landed many celebrity endorsements, often unpaid, and their energy and instinct for changing fashions have kept the company moving with the times. Asked about the different directions of Roots activities, Budman said, “Roots is a lifestyle brand — don’t even think of it as retailing necessarily. So everything comes together under that lifestyle banner.”

Roots added online retail in 1999. The new format has not made any noticeable dent in traditional store sales, Perkins said, and opens up new markets in areas of Canada where people can’t get to a Roots store. Online sales to Europe are set to begin next this year.

The very Canadian Roots image appears to have strong appeal outside the country: 45 of the company’s stores are in Taiwan, Japan and Korea, and half of online sales originate in the United States. But the U.S. operations of Roots do not yet parallel its Canadian successes. Despite announcements two years ago of an expansion drive into the United States, Roots maintains the same number of units south of the border (eight) as it had three years ago, and Perkins said there are no immediate plans to push ahead there.

Roots will have another crack at recognition in the United States, however, with the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002.

The company is set to be outfitter of the Canadian team once again, and research and preparations for Utah were started the week after the Sydney games.

 

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