In an industry filled with power-houses like Nike, Reebok and Adidas, how did a little-known Canadian athletic apparel company with a beaver as its trademark win the Winter Olympics?
The distinctive logos of the sportswear titans were nowhere to be seen on the stylish berets and midnight-blue jackets worn by American athletes as they marched into the Rice-Eccles Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony. The name that tens of millions of television viewers saw instead was Roots, selected a year ago as the official outfitter for the American team.
That choice has garnered for Toronto-based Roots and its founders, Michael Budman and Don Green, a huge amount of recognition in the US.
"I saw people wearing them and we liked them, so I wanted one, too," said Pam Larsen of Sandy, Utah, as she picked up a beret on Thursday, after waiting in line for 45 minutes to get into a jampacked Roots retail store near the medals plaza in Salt Lake City.
The rush for Roots products has not been confined to venues at the Olympics. At a Roots outlet in Birmingham, Michigan, one of just seven in the US, 400 to 500 customers a day have been flocking in, up from an average of 60 or 70 before the games began, according to the store manager, Suzy Dubiel. "We've been constantly busy every day," Dubiel said. "This is insane," Budman said Friday by telephone from Salt Lake City. He said the company has been selling 20,000 to 25,000 Roots berets a day, priced at US$19.95 each, since the start of the Olympics. "This is the greatest birthday I ever had," said Budman, who turned 56 on Feb. 12, and was on his way Friday afternoon to watch the Canada-Belarus men's hockey semifinal.
Budman and Green started Roots in 1973 after meeting at a summer camp in Algonquin Park, Ontario. Both men are natives of Detroit, and though they both married Canadians and live in Toronto, they remain American citizens.
Budman would not discuss the privately held company's finances in detail, saying only that sales last year were about 300 million Canadian dollars (US$188 million), and that they will be higher this year because of the Winter Games. It also supplied uniforms for the Canadian and British teams.
The company seems to have gotten the US Olympic Committee uniform contract more or less by default. Budman said the committee approached Roots 18 months ago. "They were looking for a cohesive, unified look for the team," he said.
A Nike spokesman said his company, based in Beaverton, Ore., ``looked at'' making a bid for the Olympic contract but could not agree on terms with the committee. The committee signed a contract with Tommy Hilfiger but rejected the company's proposed design, and is now suing the company.
The committee then turned to Roots. "It was the quality of the Roots merchandise and the enthusiasm they expressed at the initial meeting," said Matthew Biespiel, the committee's managing director for brand development. "When we showed them where we wanted to go, they became extremely excited."
Typically, uniform contracts call for the manufacturer to pay 8 percent to 12 percent of its revenue from Olympic clothing sales to the national Olympic committee. Neither Budman nor Biespiel would discuss specifics of Roots' deal with the USOC.
Little known in America before the games, Roots is well known in Canada, where it has 140 stores selling its signature sweaters, T-shirts, shoes, purses and jackets, popular with Canadians since the early 1980s.
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