It's summer, but there's a breeze coming in off the water, and in a small Austrian town on Lake Constance, a Chinese tourist walks through the old Corn Market wearing a red Roots sweatshirt.
Roots was never entirely Canadian. Founded in Toronto in 1973 by two Michigan natives, Don Green and Michael Budman, the brand has always been Canada as seen by Americans who like Algonquin Park, a vision of roughing it, Canadian style, through the patina of New England nostalgia.
What started as a binational hybrid has become global. The company announced that 2013, the year of its 40th anniversary, was its best ever due in large part to its success in Asia.
So it's appropriate that their new flagship store, which opened on Friday, was built by a student of Mies van der Rohe, whose modernist aesthetic was known in its heyday as the International Style.
Eighty Bloor West was designed by Peter Carter, built in 1972, and once was the address for architect Arthur Erickson's Toronto office. The new Roots space is 6,500 square feet on two levels.
That's a little more than a third the size of the Bloor store it's replacing, which was 18,500 square feet. And that's a reflection of the other reality of Roots circa 2014. It may be expanding in Asia, but its physical retail operations are beginning to take a back seat to its online business.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Robert Sarner