 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Shopping Centers Today -> June 2002
 PRINT THIS STORY: |
  CHANGE TEXT SIZE: |
GOING FOR THE GOLD
Olympic fever lights a fire under Roots Canada’s marketing efforts
By Maura K. Ammenheuser
 |
| Long after the 2002 Winter Olympics had ended, people were still lining up outside the stores. |
If merchandising were an Olympic event, surely the gold this year would have gone to Roots Canada.
The Toronto-based clothier is behind the snazzy blue microfleece berets that U.S. athletes sported during the 2002 Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony in February in Salt Lake City.
The berets were instantly the prize souvenirs from the games. Tourists in Salt Lake stood in line for hours to buy the $20 chapeaus, which by mid-February were going for $250 on eBay, albeit for a short time (by late March auction prices had dropped to roughly the retail price). Roots had sold several hundred thousand of these hats by early March, said CEO Marshall Myles, many of them through retailers as diverse as Nordstrom and QVC.
“We were pleasantly surprised, for sure,” Myles said.
Because U.S. athletes envied the Roots “poorboy” caps their Canadian counterparts were wearing at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan (Roots sold 700,000 of those caps, Myles said), the company was invited to outfit the Americans this winter. Roots supplied the U.S. team at no cost and pays royalties to the U.S. Olympic Committee to support U.S. athletes.
In return it got huge exposure. Olympic athletes appeared on TV wearing the berets, as well as leather jackets, fleece goods and other items bearing the logo. Demand for the hats attracted media coverage, and Canadians, too, bought lots of them, despite the “usa” emblazoned on the front, Myles said. And one month after the Olympics ended, the berets were still selling.
The craze could not have come at a better time for Roots, a household name in Canada but, at least until the Olympics, nearly unknown in the United States, where it operates only seven stores, mostly freestanding. The 29-year-old company wants to significantly increase its U.S. presence. Myles wouldn’t specify how many U.S. stores Roots envisions but said the company seeks major regional shopping centers.
The challenge for Roots is to leverage the beret publicity to establish itself in a new, extremely competitive apparel market while not relying too heavily on a fad item.
Roots’ Canadian stores, primarily in regional centers, average 3,000 square feet. Its American stores operate in Aspen, Colo.; Beverly Hills, Calif.; Birmingham, Mich.; New York City; Park City, Utah; and Salt Lake City.
Its Salt Lake locations are two 400-square-foot kiosks at The Gateway, a pedestrian mall that the locally based Boyer Co. opened in November. Project manager Jake Boyer, familiar with Roots for years because his family has spent time in Canada, raves about the retailer.
 |
| President George W. Bush, shown here with skater Michelle Kwan, sports a Roots jacket. |
“I think they’ll do [incredibly] here,” Boyer said. “Their product line is top-notch. The quality of clothing is top-notch.”
Eleven days after the Olympics closed, people were still lined up at Gateway’s Roots stores, and not just for berets. “They’re buying everything,” he said at the time.
Roots is firmly grounded in Canada’s retail scene. The company’s original product in 1973 was the “negative heel” shoe (its heel dipped lower than the cushy sole), a hit with the outdoorsy crowd. Since then, Roots has become a “lifestyle” brand, branching into sportswear, leather goods, accessories, children’s wear and more. It has some 220 stores in four countries and outfits the U.K. Olympic team in addition to the U.S. and Canadian teams.
American observers describe the company as a Canadian Gap in terms of merchandise and omnipresence., but Tony Grossi, executive vice president of operations for Toronto’s Cadillac Fairview Corp., said Roots is more high-end and choosier about its locations.
“If you look at leather goods, [Roots] strives to be Coach,” Grossi said. “Look at apparel, they strive to be Abercrombie [& Fitch]. Look at massive scale, they strive to be the Gap.”
Roots’ sales reach C$500 ($317) to $1,500 per square foot in Cadillac Fairview centers, Grossi said.
 |
To succeed in America, Roots must differentiate itself from U.S. apparel chains, offer relevant products and “build a presence fast” to capitalize on the Olympic publicity, said Mich Bergesen, CEO of Brand Economics, a New York consulting firm. It needs “an aggressive media campaign,” he noted, “and it shouldn’t depend on the fact [that] it’s an Olympic sponsor,” but on its image as a supplier to healthy, active youth.
Roots has a multipronged strategy for attacking the U.S. market, Myles said.
First, it wants prime real estate, such as “a flagship on Michigan Avenue in Chicago,” he said. And Roots already sells through companies established in the United States, such as Host Marriott, which operates stores in 27 U.S. airports.
The chain also wants to expand a strong corporate business, in which it sells merchandise to companies bearing their logos. Last, it intends to gain more publicity from sponsoring the Sundance Film Festival and supplying the U.S. Open tennis tournament and events like it.
But does Roots need to tinker with its product line to appeal to American consumers? It already does, Myles said, and it even tailors its merchandise region by region. The Aspen store carries colors and styles different from those in New York, he said. “We call it ‘mass customization.’”
Whether it succeeds in the United States in the long term remains to be seen. But even if Roots never becomes an established U.S. brand, it can at least congratulate itself on being one of the biggest winners at the Winter Olympics.
 | Current Issue November 2008 |