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Canada Goose Chairman Dani Reiss Spins Pricey Parkas Into Gold

Canada Goose Chairman Dani Reiss Spins Pricey Parkas Into Gold

(Bloomberg) -- Canada Goose Holdings Inc.’s store in Soho was doing brisk business on a midweek evening in February, with a steady stream of New York shoppers trying on the company’s trademark parkas with coyote fur-lined hoods, some priced at $1,495.

Canada Goose Chairman Dani Reiss Spins Pricey Parkas Into Gold

That demand has helped boost the retailer’s shares, which have surged 173 percent since its initial public offering last March, enough to give Chief Executive Officer Dani Reiss a $1 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The stock advanced 5.1 percent Wednesday.

Reiss, 44, who’s also chairman, owns about a fifth of the Toronto-based outfitter. He declined to discuss his net worth.

“That’s not something I’m really comfortable talking about,” he said in a phone interview last week after the company posted a fiscal third-quarter profit that beat analysts’ estimates. “I’m as committed to this company as I have ever been. I love what I do. I love coming to work every day.”

Canada Goose Chairman Dani Reiss Spins Pricey Parkas Into Gold

In 1957, Sam Tick founded Metro Sportswear Ltd., which specialized in woolen vests, raincoats and snowmobile suits. Reiss’s father David, who was Tick’s son-in-law, joined the company in the 1970s and bought a majority stake in 1985, according to a 2017 New Yorker profile.

Reiss started working with his father in 1997 and took over as CEO in 2001. He led a rebranding blitz that emphasized the brand’s made-in-Canada cred and a rugged history that includes supplying coats to scientists at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station.

“The world is thirsty for more Canada,” Reiss, who has a degree in English literature from the University of Toronto, wrote in a 2017 book about the company, featuring a foreword by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “It is time for Canadians and Canadian companies to start imagining success on a significantly greater scale.”

Celebrities including Rihanna and Ben Affleck have embraced the brand. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. founder Jack Ma, Asia’s richest person, sported a Canada Goose parka last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Canada Goose Chairman Dani Reiss Spins Pricey Parkas Into Gold

The coat, with its signature red, white and blue circular logo -- an inverted map of the arctic -- have become a winter staple for fashionistas worldwide and attracted a fanatical fan base. The company history tells of one customer with 20 coats who mostly wears them around his air-conditioned house in Atlanta.

Not to be outdone, Reiss is entitled to 100 complimentary coats a year as CEO.

To contact the reporters on this story: Tom Metcalf in New York at tmetcalf7@bloomberg.net, Sandrine Rastello in Montreal at srastello@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Goldstein at agoldstein5@bloomberg.net, Peter Eichenbaum, Robert LaFranco

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.