When franchise owner Chris Cudmore or one of his employees locks the door at 156 Queen St. for the last time at the close of business Saturday, it will mark the end of an era for Roots Canada Ltd. as its last retail franchise store in the country in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island closes Jan. 3.
The Cudmore family, however, won’t disappear from retailing in Charlottetown with the closure of its Roots franchise store. Previously a partner in the independent retail clothing store retail Henderson and Cudmore, which was a fixture in downtown for Charlottetown for decades, the space occupied by the present Roots store will be reopening a few days later as a Cool As A Moose® franchise store. Cool As A Moose® is a specialty retailer featuring Maine-themed apparel, gifts, souvenirs and sunglasses company, founded in 1986 in Bar Harbor, with stores in Maine also in Portland, Brunswick and Freeport, and in Canada in Halifax, Quebec City, Banff, Whistler – and next week, Charlottetown. Cool As A Moose® – now owned by American Kip Stone, a competitive Open 50 class Rhode Island sailor, who also lives in Maine and also owns Westbrook, Maine-based Artforms – was named the 2011 Merchant of the Year by the Maine Merchants Association.
About eight of the current Roots employees have been offered employment at the new Cool As A Moose® store on Queen Street in Charlottetown.
More than 200 company-owned Roots and Roots 73 stores are not affected by the end of franchise operations in Canada. Cudmore had been operating the Roots franchise in Charlottetown for about 25 years . “At one time there might have been 15 or 20 franchises across the country, but we’re the last franchise standing and we really didn’t fit the Roots model anymore,” Cudmore told CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster. “They had an infrastructure just to service us. They had two or three employees dedicated to looking after the franchises.”
While Roots is in many ways an iconic Canadian brand, the privately-held company was founded in 1973, ironically, as well as iconically, by two Americans from Detroit, Michael Budman and Don Green. Both had been campers and later on staff at Camp Tamakwa on South Tea Lake in Central Ontario’s Algonquin Park. Camp Tamakwa was founded in 1936 by naturalist Lou Handler, a former prizefighter from Detroit, and canoeist and famed Canadian solo paddler Omer Stringer, and is a summer home to 250 to 300 boys and girls – ages seven to 16 – and more than 130 staff. Tamakwa campers are mostly Canadian and American with some campers coming from Mexico, Israel, England, France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. Canadian campers are mostly from the Toronto area and Americans are mostly from the suburbs of Detroit, but others are from places like New York, Illinois, Florida and California.
Budman and Green first thought up the idea for Roots and did the initial planning for it in Algonquin Park in 1972. By then they had both moved to Canada and were living in Toronto. They both still have cabins in Algonquin Park. The well-known Roots logo – featuring the Cooper font and the quintessential Canadian beaver – was created by graphic designers Heather Cooper and Robert Burns.
Roots has more than 200 company-owned retail stores in Canada, the United States, and in China and Taiwan in Asia. Roots began with a small store in Toronto selling a “negative heel” shoe, designed to keep the heel slightly lower than the rest of the foot to promote proper alignment of the spine. Unlike traditional footwear, which elevates the heel and shifts a person’s center of balance forward as they walk, negative heel shoes work with the foot’s natural motion, with the heel striking the ground first and bearing the most weight. The shoes are also designed to be wider at the front and narrower at the heel to support the foot comfortably and avoid crowding the toes. Developed by Danish yoga instructor Ann Kalso in the 1950s, the shoes mimic the traditional Tadasana, or mountain pose, taking the stress off one’s back, hips and knees and putting it on the leg muscles.
Starting in Toronto with footwear, Roots evolved to include leather bags, jackets, accessories, natural fiber clothing and home furnishings. Roots also has a network of approximately 40 outlet stores throughout Canada called Roots 73.
Roots still has a leather goods factory in Toronto on Caledonia Road, operated by the Kowalewski family. The Kowalewskis were originally from Poland and then Argentina before immigrating to Canada. Jan Kowalewski had a small family business, Boa Shoe Company, on College Street in Toronto, and manufactured negative heel shoes for Roots in its earliest days, before Roots purchased the Boa Shoe Company. Family patriarch, Jan, along with his sons, Richard, Henry, Karl and Stan, worked for Roots for years and the latter three continue to, as the Kowalewski family is now in its third generation working with Roots.
Unable to compete with offshore manufacturing companies, Roots outsourced the manufacturing of much of its apparel line to Chinese and other Asian factories a decade ago.
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