| Sure Canada Goose makes a nice parka, but have you tried its masks? And might you be into its boots? The Toronto-based apparel empire has long had a one-product problem. The market for a four-figure sleeping bag of a coat, well, it's not infinite. And considering climate change, it's probably shrinking a bit at the margins. No one understands this more than CEO Dani Reiss, heir to the family down empire. I spoke with Dani seven years ago just before his parkas became nearly ubiquitous. Today, not only does he have to weather that fashion storm, but he has to please shareholders, having taken the company public in March 2017. In short, Reiss needs to widen the product line or the customer base -- preferably both. This is the survival strategy for a one-hit wonder. It's why Amazon now sells server space, Apple dialed up a watch business and Casper is stuffing dog beds and hawking weighted blankets. The big Goose has proved remarkably adept on this front. As the pandemic shut down international travel, a major revenue stream for the company's retail stores, it pushed hard into China. Reiss accurately surmised the country would get clear of COVID more quickly than most places. And, at times, it's plenty cold. "We thought that would be smart," he told me Wednesday, "and it paid off." The company's direct-to-consumer sales in China surged 42% in the last quarter of 2020. At the same time, Canada Goose has cut out the middleman. When it went public, nine out of 10 revenue dollars came from wholesale. Today, it's just one in three as its web stores, in particular, hum along. Nike and similar blue-chip apparel giants know that going to direct to consumers helps prop up pricing power and streamline inventory. The last thing Canada Goose wants is a mountain of deeply discounted parkas piling up in outlet stores every spring (or every time a retailer gets short on cash). Then there's the product. The masks sold out quickly and will stay on the expanding list of skus. Canada Goose now makes sweaters, fleece jackets, raincoats,  Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, March 15, 2021. Subscribe now. and scads of things more appropriate for the shoulder seasons than a nuclear winter. In the fall, it will unveil a line of footwear, a notoriously tricky category. Reiss is optimistic, in part, because he bought the boots, rather than built them. In late 2018, Canada Goose spent $32.5 million to snap up Baffin, which makes boots with names like "Snow Monster." "We took our time," Reiss says. "We didn't want to just sign a license deal or do it in a quick way." As for moving more parkas, Canada Goose recently started tapping guest designers for capsule collaborations -- first Angel Chen, a Shanghai-based artist, and a few days ago streetwear designer Rhude for a partnership with the NBA. CJ McCollum does not dog-sled, at least as far as I know, but he and his compatriots are sartorial tastemakers at a level exceptional even among professional athletes. This is another page out of the Nike playbook. Guest designers give brand loyalists a somewhat special version of the standard product — another excuse to buy. At the same time, it brings new customers into the brand. "Collaborations are a very important way to authentically speak to audiences we might not otherwise be able to speak to," Reiss says. "And the authenticity is what makes it sustainable." When asked why customers are game to buy all this other gear, Reiss uses the "L" word: lifestyle. His charge, he claims, has become more than the sum of its puffy parts. It is to winter, in a way, what Lululemon is to yoga. "It's been an objective for years," Reiss says. And while climate change may be an existential threat, it's also an opportunity for Canada goose to further burnish its brand. In the depths of the pandemic, the company published its first sustainability report, a 56-page outline of aggressive philanthropy -- the kind of do-good-by-doing--good strategy that has paid off so handsomely for Patagonia. "I don't think in 20 years there's going to be a company in existence that is not good for the world," Reiss says. Among other things, the company will start getting its fur from used coats, not new coyotes and it aims to zero out its carbon footprint by 2026. Reiss, a literature student and closet writer, has a catchy line for all this: "We want to keep the planet cool and the people on it warm." That includes their hands and feet, of course. | 
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