Canadian Rooted ?

When we began to think of Canadian Fashion we immediately thought of Roots. Their store is cluttered with Canadian symbolism, such as Canadian flags and beavers. So their clothes must be made in Canada! That is where we were wrong.

I remember about two summers ago going for an interview at Roots. Like any good interviewee I researched the company. I recalled reading something about how not all of their clothing was made in Canada, reading it at the time I didn’t care much. I recently revisited the Roots website to investigate and this time I was a lot more attentive. On Roots web page appropriately titled “ How We Do Business: An open letter about our standards and approach to social responsibility” I discovered a dirty little secret.

With a letter opening with “Global outsourcing is unquestionably a highly complex issue” I knew I was not going to be pleased with the information that followed. As I continued to read this letter addressed to the “Dear Roots costumer” I began to discover that Roots was not as Canadian as I once believed. For about a page I felt as if Roots was trying to tell me about how they ran their business ethically, responsibly, prepping me for the devastation of the truth, that not all their clothes were made in Canada. This admittance came in the form of the following words “For the longest while we made most Roots products in Canada but in recent years we have shifted some of our manufacturing abroad as result of technical, economic, and capacity challenges.”

The letter goes on to say that they tried for seven years to compete with offshore manufacturing companies, but it was “unprofitable and unrealistic exercise”. This is perhaps what upset me the most. How can we as Canadians not buy Canadian? How can we wear or national animal (the beaver, also Roots icon) across our chests, and declare proudly that we are Canadian, when that beaver sweater was fabricated in a country that has probably never seen a beaver?!

Roots shared the same feelings with me and could have not said it any better than this “The sad reality today is that there are increasingly fewer suitable suppliers in Canada, and certain products can no longer be made in Canada. It’s a shame that free trade, globalization and the saturation of the Canadian market by major US and European companies manufacturing overseas have made this situation worse. The result: the technical capacity no longer exists in Canada to make certain categories of merchandise.”

If this does not deeply offend you, then maybe you do not share the same pride in this country as I do. How can we call ourselves Canadian, when nothing about us is truly Canadian? How can we have an impact in a global community when we cannot even have an impact on our own? For those who do not realize this project is about more than just fashion. It is about Canada’s inability to sustain any sort of industry on its own, fashion just happens to be a great example of these shortcomings in Canada.

For the entire letter please visit: http://about.roots.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-RootsCorporate-Site/default/Link-Page?cid=MSTR_HOW_WE_DO_BUSINESS


-Courtney