Sun, Feb 24, 2002 page11

• Taking Root in Salt Lake City

  SPORTSWEAR The athletic clothing company struck gold when the US olympic team asked the Canadian-based firm to become its official outfitter last year

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  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.

  

  Customers stand in the check-out line at the Roots Olympic Clothing store located in Salt Lake City on Friday. The distinctive logos of the sportswear titans were nowhere to be seen on the clothing worn by American athletes during the opening Olympics ceremony in Salt Lake City, Utah. A year ago, Roots, a Toronto-based company was selected as the official outfitter for the American team.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  "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.

  

  Americans Vonetta Flowers, left, and Jill Bakken pictured after getting their gold medals Wednesday night, wore Roots sportswear.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  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.

  "They've just been doing a better job than anyone else" in combining durability, fashion, comfort and creativity, according to John Torella, senior partner at the JC Williams Group, a Toronto retailing consultancy.

  "You can take a great Nike or Reebok product, but it's not that differentiated," Torella said. Pointing to the "poor boy" hats that Roots designed for the Canadian team at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, Torella said, "When Roots came up with the cap, everyone wanted it. It's like, `I've got to have it.'"

  According to Biespiel, American athletes at Nagano said they wanted uniforms like the Canadians.'

  Vanessa Myers, a Salt Lake City resident, waited in line for two hours at the downtown Roots store to buy Olympic-team berets this week. "You can buy them for the whole family, the parents and kids," she said. "They have a comfortable look and a nice style."

  Budman and Green have built Roots around products that emphasize outdoor comfort and a relentless pursuit of celebrities to show off those products.

  Their first mark was made in the mid-1970s with a reverse-heel shoe -- one in which the back of the foot rests lower than the front. They plugged the shoe and other apparel relentlessly to prominent visitors to the Toronto Film Festival, then in its early days.

  Geoff Pevere, a Toronto Star reporter who has written a book about the company, said Budman and Green "were like the clothes-marketing versions of paparazzi -- they were ubiquitous at film festival parties."

  The strategy continues today. A few days after the games began, Rosie O'Donnell wore a Roots-designed Olympics uniform on her talk show. A publicist for the show said the clothes were sent to O'Donnell by the Roots store in New York.

  "I love the lifestyle of show business, and most of my friends are in show business," Budman said.

  But, he added, "we never pay people to wear clothes. They wear them because they like them."

  Budman and Green, who is 52, have tried to extend their apparel success into other ventures, so far with little success. Last year, they lent the Roots name to a Canadian air charter company that was trying to establish a scheduled airline, but Roots Air was grounded after less than two months in operation. Other abortive ventures have included a European lifestyle magazine called Passion and a ski lodge in Aspen, Colorado.

  Now, though, their attention will be concentrated on following up their Olympics success. The company plans to open 300 new outlets in the US over the next eight years. And American athletes will be marching before the world's television cameras in Roots uniforms again at the Summer Games in Athens in 2004.
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