Reiss’ shrewd guerrilla marketing to influencers worked.
Model Kate Upton graced Sports Illustrated’s cover in 2013 in a Canada Goose. In an era of fast fashion, rampant counterfeiting and hypersensitive Millennials who are already looking askance at Reiss’ fur-lined coats, he must keep Canada Goose’s premium cachet from flying south permanently. Fashion’s bargain bin of brands-from True Religion to Uggs to Aéropostale-is brimming with once-hot has-beens. Now that Canada Goose has entered the pantheon of global luxury brands, Reiss must deftly navigate an unforgiving retail marketplace.
Canada Goose’s stock, listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges, has soared to stratospheric levels despite a series of stock sales by Bain and Reiss, who has become a billionaire. Two years ago, Reiss and investor Bain Capital raised $250 million in an IPO. This has helped the company maintain envious operating margins of 23%, nearly double Columbia Sportswear’s and higher even than those of luxury giants like LVMH, Burberry and Prada.
Its clothes have become fashion items, and celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Daniel Radcliffe and Ben Affleck are regularly seen wearing the coats.Ĭanada Goose’s customer base may have changed drastically, but its core line of coats, which now sell out at stores like Nordstrom, remains largely the same. Canada Goose did $460 million in sales in 2018, more than triple the number from four years earlier. He took the brand upmarket, boosting the price of his down coats to $1,000 and targeting wealthy city dwellers in cold climates with a heavy dose of influencer marketing-before the concept even existed. As a kid, he was more comfortable in fictional worlds, particularly the expansively drawn one in The Lord of the Rings, than he was in the world of dollars and down that his parents occupied.īut when he did take over the company nearly 20 years ago, he revealed a talent for implementing Tolkien-size marketing ambitions and pushed the business, which he renamed Canada Goose, out of its comfortable niche. “It was the last thing I ever wanted to do,” says Reiss, 45, who dreamed about becoming a writer. “But we were selling to a really small population.”Īt first, he had no intention of running the business. “We had gathered a cult following in the coldest places on Earth,” Reiss says, plucking bits of down from his blue-and-black-checkered sports coat.