Canada Goose'S New Shop Does Not Allow People To Buy Clothes. What Does It Want?

As Canada's top selling luxury brand, Canada Goose (Canada goose) has not stopped accelerating development. In December 5th, in the Sherway Gardens shopping center in the outskirts of Toronto, the brand twentieth line store The Journey was officially completed.
Most of the new stores are occupied by various interactive devices. The long narrow ice road paved with digital glass panels is full of sensors. The ice surface beneath people's feet will split with weight changes. What followed was a 60 foot wide arc display, where winter landscape changes will alternate. Then came the "extremely cold fitting room" with a temperature of 20 degrees below zero. Here, customers wearing the Canada Goose coat will be exposed to the cold wind and snowflakes and experience the real "ice and snow".
Apart from the rich immersive interactive experience, the brand also launched the concept of retail without stock for the first time.
There are only a few samples of clothing for customers to try on. If you want to purchase, you can only place orders on the electronic screen at the exit and through the official website of the brand. "This way can really make people feel the brand nature of Canada Goose and its historical trajectory," said Dani Reiss, the brand's chief executive. "We want to create an atmosphere that is different from the shopping center, so that consumers can recognize our excellent performance and high-end positioning."
Clothing display and stock reserve have been an indispensable factor in offline retailing. But with the popularity of the "Showroom" mode in the retail industry, "Experiential Retail" began to rise. After Bonobos, Nordstrom, Suitsupply and many other retailers have made a positive attempt to this concept, Canada Goose no longer waits and finally enters the game.
In view of the rapid development of various e-commerce platforms and online channels, physical stores are no longer the only option for customers to complete shopping and consumption. Many brands are thinking about how to continue to attract consumers to enter the store and continue to play the role of offline stores. "No inventory" is one of the solutions. Light consumption and heavy experience have become the new direction of development. Brand loyalty has also been consolidated in enhancing consumer interaction.
Canada Goose new shop displays a sensor on the jacket. Picture source: the other side offers
"Although people will go to stores, they will pay more attention to the interaction and relationship with brands," said Jessica Ramirez, a retail research analyst at Jane Hali & Associates. "In addition to shopping, we should pay more attention to experience, which is the new reality faced by stores. Those shops that are not aware of this new change are either less crowded or no longer open.
For Canada Goose, store innovation is not only to respond to the changing trend of the retail industry, but also to compete with the fiercely developing competitors. Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie & Fitch, and luxury brands Balenciaga, Prada and Gucci have begun selling high-performance coats.
Canada Goose's rival Moncler is making the market competition of high-end down jacket in white hot state. Since Remo Ruffuni took over the brand in 2003, Moncler, the original outdoor mountaineering product, has made great strides toward the positioning of "fashion brand". Its newly launched "Genius" project has invited many designers such as Teng Yuan Hao, Craig Green, Pierpaolo Piccioli and so on, and has won a lot of attention and heated discussions. In 2018, the brand sales exceeded $1 billion 500 million.
The fashion of Moncler is becoming more and more fashionable. At the same time, it makes the difference between Canada and Goose more obvious.
The Canadian geese, who originated in 1957, are Metro Sportswear, a company designed for outdoor workers in cold weather. The reason why it is widely known is that Reiss's Hollywood strategy, such as Rihanna, Drake and the game of power, and other celebrities are wearing "geese" coats in various fields.
After the increase in brand awareness, sales also increased from $3 million in 2001 when Reiss took office, to $635 million in 2018. It is undeniable that the celebrity effect has promoted the emergence of phenomenal popularity. A large proportion of consumers have become strong brand audiences because of their strong practical functions such as warmth retention, wind resistance and waterproofing. But the brand's high price and symbolic Logo design are also a symbol of people's purchasing power to some extent, and are sought after by Asian customers, especially Chinese customers. In this regard, the Woodchurch high school in Britain also forbids wearing Canada Goose jackets on campus to avoid bringing psychological pressure to some of the relatively ordinary students. Even in London and Chicago, there has been a robbery against Canada Goose wearers.
The manufacture of Canadian local factories and the use of high quality white feather and coyote fur have become a guarantee for the performance of Canada Goose, but this has caused strong protests from animal protection organizations such as PETA. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also made a lot of controversy about whether the brand is in line with ethical standards in dealing with animals such as geese and coyote.
Because of the controversy and the impact of market competitors, some analysts and investors are skeptical about whether Canada Goose can continue to grow. In May, the company's share price fell by 26%. Its latest report shows that the annual growth rate of the brand has dropped from 40% to 20%, and nearly half of its sales have relied on third party retailers. This has exacerbated the fragility and instability of the wholesale business.
Canada Goose, which is aware of the crisis, is exploring more direct consumer oriented retail channels, including launching brand official websites in various regional markets and speeding up the offline layout of flagship stores. At the end of last year, it opened its first store in the Asian market in Hongkong and Beijing, China, and achieved great success. Even though Hongkong's unstable situation has affected, sales in Asia have doubled in the latest quarter.
But the growth of China's local down brands, especially the Bosideng, which has exceeded 100 billion yuan in annual revenue, has also posed a threat to the market share of Canada Goose.
The launch of the "The Journey" concept store is the latest charging chip for Canada Goose.
In addition to carrying its brand concept, the new store's stock free mode may also promote consumers' purchase intention. The research jointly published by Walton business school and Harvard Business School and Vc firms Idea Farm Ventures shows that in the "Showroom" environment, customers may be willing to spend more than 60% on the purchase of more expensive goods.
In addition, no inventory can simplify the logistics operation process, and the brand can save the store purchase, and directly cooperate with the distribution center to deliver the product to the customer's home. Clerks can spend more time communicating with their guests instead of tidying up their stock and indoor display.
"Every inventory is related to the company's cash flow," said Sonia Lapinsky, managing director of retail business at Alix Partners. "No inventory reduces the cost risk of the retail industry."
But this new retail concept is still in the early stage of development.
Brian Bolke founded a brand store named Conversatory in Hudson square in New York in March this year. After trying out the concept of no stock, only a few weeks later, he moved the stock back to the store and converted it into a business mode of both consignment and wholesale sale. "We soon discovered that customers actually wanted to buy things home more conveniently," he said. "They think that products in store can be bought at any time."
"It may take three to four hours to transport products in store shelves," Bolke added. "You need to control logistics and logistics to truly operate the no stock mode."
Reiss also acknowledges that there will be potential risks, but he believes that Canada Goose must try this new mode to enhance the scale of its direct selling business. Besides, Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus and other old department stores have been unable to protect themselves.
"The Journey" has received a lot of e-mail booking by consumers. In order to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the new model, Canada Goose will collect and organize consumer behavior data and conduct follow-up and analysis work.
"In a rapidly changing retail environment, it is very important to try new things," Reiss said. "In the Internet age, consumer behavior, different consumer responses, people want to really understand a brand and so on are all undergoing tremendous changes. We must stand at the forefront of these changes. Although we don't know whether we can succeed in business now, if we don't try, we will never know the answer.