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Record 1 of 1 in CBCA Fulltext Business 1998 Annual

TI:  The roots of Roots [Roots Canada's origins as a counter-culture renegade offers hope to all entrepreneurs who stray from the beaten path] 
AU:  Pevere-Geoff
PN:  Profit-The-Magazine-for-Canadian-Entrepreneurs
SO:  Profit: The Magazine for Canadian Entrepreneurs, v.17(5) O'98 pg 55-60.
Illustrations
FA:  Fulltext: 2482 words
IS:  1183-1324
CI:  Roots-Canada-Ltd
CZ:  Roots Canada Ltd
PT:  Most-Recent-Update; Corporate-profile; Journal-article
SF:  Illustrations
PD:  981000
PY:  1998
AN:  4339579
LN:  LONG
FT:  Sweatshirt king, cultural icon and gold-medal designer of Olympic caps:
Roots Canada's origins as a counter-culture renegade offers hope to all
entrepreneurs who stray from the beaten path

Like the story of Canada, the Roots story has any number of beginnings, but
this is one of the best. It opens in a monastery in Santos, Brazil, circa
1957.

A Danish-born clothing designer and yoga teacher recovering from an
operation, Anna Kals[Symbol Not Transcribed]o was drawn to this remote
South American monastery to study yogic breathing techniques. Struck by
the impeccable posture of barefoot Brazilian natives -- and recently
converted to the spinal benefits of the lotus position -- Kals[Symbol Not
Transcribed]o began contemplating the circuits of wellness connecting the
soul, the posture, the feet, and the ground. For most people, these are
short-circuited -- by carpeting, concrete, inertia, stiletto heels or
maybe Western civilization in general. For Kals[Symbol Not Transcribed]o,
drawing fresh air deep into her rejuvenating body and soul, one thing
about the circuitry of good health became dead clear: it started where the
ground meets the body, and where each step reminds us of our primeval
connection to the earth.

The problem was, you weren't going to convince too many Florsheimed
first-world types -- however spiritually desperate or spinally challenged
-- of the benefits of walking barefoot, particularly on ice and asphalt.
So, if you couldn't change the ground, how about the way you walked on it?
And that's how Anna Kals[Symbol Not Transcribed] got the idea for ``The
Earth Shoe.'' Or so the story goes.

Proceeding on the podiatrically unorthodox principle that the natural and
most healthful position for the walking foot placed the heel lower than
the toe, Kals[Symbol Not Transcribed] set out to develop a shoe that would
replicate the sensation and benefits of walking barefoot. Some several
hundred miles and 10 years later, she had personally road-tested her idea
to market-readiness.

Patenting the design and Earth Shoe name, Kalso sold the vaguely ducklike
shoe from a small shop in Copenhagen. It being the late Sixties, word of
the enterprise got around. One day a movie producer named Ray Jacobs
wandered into Kalso's shop. Ray's wife Ellie had been suffering from
persistent lower back pain, so they decided to check out this shoe they'd
been hearing so much about.

After a few days of walking around in Earth Shoes, Ellie and Ray were
thrilled -- Ellie by the apparent relief from spinal discomfort, Ray by a
potential counter-cultural marketing bonanza. So they asked Anna about
taking the recessed-heel idea to the States. Anna agreed, but only after
subjecting the Jacobses to a battery of spiritual fitness tests --
personal interviews, astrological charts -- and making sure that she kept
at least one foot (so to speak) in the coming Earth Shoe Bonanza.

The first Jacobs Earth Shoe outlet opened in 1970 in Manhattan, its
unveiling timed to coincide with ``Earth Day.'' A smash success, the
modest orthopedic empire soon spread to more than 40 outlets nationwide.
Through the countercultural press particularly, the physical and spiritual
benefits of the negative-heel shoe were extolled by podiatrists and
alternative-lifestyle gurus alike; soon the indisputably clunky-looking
footwear was adorning turned-in, turned-on and dropped-out feet across the
nation.

Not surprisingly, two of those feet belonged to Don Green.

He was an upper middle-class dropout son of an auto-parts manufacturer,
whose interest in things healthy was matched only by his interests in
hockey and making a living on his own terms. Green and Michael Budman --
both ex-Detroiters with draft deferments and therefore in the unusual
position, for draft-age American males, of being in Canada by choice --
were looking to start a business in Toronto that would allow them to
continue the laid-back life to which they'd become accustomed. The two had
met as teenagers in 1962, and over the years had forged a bond as tightly
stitched as the leatherwear they'd soon be famous for.

Budman, like Green, had fallen hard for Canada while a camper at Algonquin
Park's Camp Tamakwa; he had moved to Toronto when the streets of Detroit
became a riot zone in the late sixties, and his stint as a high school
teacher had devolved into a gig hauling fruit crates through the Ontario
Food Terminal. Green had recently returned from bumming in Jamaica after
dropping out of Michigan State.

Clearly, they needed something to do -- provided it wasn't too strenuous.
As Green revealed to a TV interviewer years later: ``We said to ourselves,
`What is something we could do where we could get a lot of time off?'''

Having studied the retail potential of everything from yogurt and waterbeds
to flowers and fruit, Green suggested they get into the negative-heel
trade, which was already showing signs of the boom to come. So they went
to New York to see Ray Jacobs about acquiring the Canadian franchise
rights to the Earth Shoe.

At first it looked good for the ex-Tamakwans, but things fell through. ``He
was a corporation type,'' Green told People magazine of Jacobs. ``The
vibes weren't right.'' Undeterred, and probably bereft of alternatives,
Budman and Green decided to go it alone. Why not design their own version
of the Earth Shoe and sell it themselves? Green got to work designing a
more user-friendly, less hippie-utilitarian variation on Kalso's original:
a less radical incline between toe and heel, a soft, all-natural interior,
and a design with crossover potential beyond the yoga-yogurt set. Not to
put too fine a point on it, a dorked-down Earth Shoe. Kind of ugly, but as
comfortable as bare feet on a beach.

Freeze this frame. We've reached a key moment in Roots history, the first
occasion when the company would profit enormously from the careful
modification of something already there. Roots is not a fashion innovator,
but an expert marketer of the traditional and familiar to the conservative
mass market. It didn't invent the negative heel, but modified it for wider
appeal than the hippie boutique market, and sold it with a zeal and
intelligence that was new. In the coming decades, it would happen again
with the Roots Beaver Athletic sweatshirt and the poorboy cap, both of
which had been around for decades by the time Roots turned them into
full-fledged fashion phenomena. By catching a wave at precisely the right
time and knowing just how to ride it, Roots has consistently surfed in the
black.

Applying the basic design to several shoe styles -- desert boot, moccasin,
city and sport -- Green was ready to put the product into production. All
he needed was a factory that made shoes. Throwing a $15,000 loan from
Don's father -- like Budman's dad, a prosperous Detroit entrepreneur --
into their pooled Bar Mitzvah savings, the boys went to the first shoe
manufacturer listed in the Toronto Yellow Pages. But the shoe giant Bata
didn't bite.

Budman and Green dialled the next shoemaker listed in the book. Boa Shoe
Co. was a tiny family operation run by a Polish expatriate whose family
had once made boots for Czar Nicholas II. Now Jan Kowalewski, surrounded
by his shoe-making sons Henry, Richard, Stanley and Karl, was listening to
two young strangers with a dog in tow and a notion to make shoes that
would make people feel like they were standing barefoot in sand. Absurdity
notwithstanding, Kowalewski agreed -- on condition he could add his own
modifications -- to produce 120 pairs of these odd and unCzarlike shoes.

Now Budman and Green had everything except a company name and a store to
sell from. ``Roots'' was found by Don, who kept stumbling across the term
in a girfriend's textbooks. Don liked its all-natural, organic ring:
``Your feet are connected to the ground, like a tree is,'' he said
earnestly in an interview. (Several interviews, actually.) ``Really, your
feet are your roots.''

With a Heather Cooper-designed beaver logo adorning the doorway, the first
Roots store opened on Yonge Street just north of Davenport, mere blocks
north of the former hippie mecca of Yorkville.

On Day 1, August 15, 1973, the store moved seven pairs of the ``Roots
Shoe'' at a hefty $35 a pair. The next Saturday 30 pairs walked out the
door, which meant the doors could remain open for another week.

The following Saturday, for reasons only slightly less fathomable than the
seventies themselves, the ethereal forces of fashion faddism converged
above the little shoe store on Yonge Street. There were line-ups around
the block. The shoes sold out, and there were waiting lists for the
customers at the end of the line. Said Budman 10 years later, ``It was
like a gold rush.''

However you choose to characterize it, the Roots shoe -- more than the
Kalso original -- was a bona fide, out-of-nowhere, standout phenomenon.
Indeed, a full accounting of the popular tastes of the seventies is
incomplete without the Roots shoe: it deserves a parking spot in
historical posterity every bit as lofty as those reserved for Farrah,
Fonzie, Burt and Dark Side of the Moon. It was so popular so quickly that,
within three years, the Roots-made negative heel was not only dubbed the
``the Gucci shoe of the crunchy granola set'' by People magazine, but it
made full-fledged marketing stars of Michael Budman and Don Green.

Demonstrating the promotional instincts that would quickly set Roots apart
from all contemporary competitors, Budman and Green instantly started
sending free pairs of the shoes to some of the most famous feet in the
world. Paul McCartney, Cher, Elton John, Pierre Trudeau, his wife Margaret
-- all were photographed wearing their negative heels, and each photo
yielded incalculable to-die-for free promotion. By 1975, you'd have had to
have been holed up in a Brazilian monastery not to have heard of Roots.

If it were too good to last -- and who had time to consider such things
with all those hungry feet waiting around the block? -- Budman and Green
were too busy calculating the next step to fret much. More practical
problems loomed: with this volume of shoes being sold, it was obvious
Roots needed its own footwear factory. So the suddenly prosperous owners
-- whose company was worth more than a million dollars in less than six
months -- made an offer to Jan and his boys: How would they like to become
full-time employees of Roots?

Kowalewski agreed, and within three months the family was working for Roots
exclusively. (They still do.) A new plant was commandeered to keep up with
demand, and within a year the Kowalewskis were making 2,000 pairs of Roots
footwear a day.

If the negative-heel boom had been the result of a master plan, there'd
still be seminars on the shoe's making and marketing. However, like much
of the Roots story, it was really blind luck colliding with inspired
improvisation. From the far side of success some years on, Green offered
this account of Roots' strategy for world domination: ``We had absolutely
no idea of what we were doing. But we were having so much fun doing it.''

But if the success of the Roots shoe took both consumers and creators by
storm, and if Green and Budman are renowned for their faith in the
mystical ``gut'' instinct, the collaboration was hardly calculation-free.
For example, while the Kals[Symbol Not Transcribed] Earth Shoe was
promoted on a wave of dubious therapeutic claims, the Roots variation
promised only tops in comfort and quality. ``Unlike ordinary shoes,''
reads a 1975 ad, ``you stand in Roots, not on them. There are other casual
shoes that look like Roots at first glance. But none of them has the
obvious love of good leather and fine boot-making you'll find in a pair of
Roots.''

Not once did Roots claim that the shoe was good for you, nor was it
recommended for people seeking podiatric relief. You wore them because
they felt great, because they were a quality product, and because you were
simply too confident and self-actualized to give a toss what other people
thought. A good strategic move, for it would be the issue of the Earth
Shoe's alleged therapeutic benefits that would bring the negative-heel fad
down harder and faster than Evel Knievel over Snake River Canyon.

Good thing they'd finally decided to listen to designer Robert Burns, who
had challenged an elementary team rule back in 1975 by refusing to don
Roots shoes. Asked about it, Burns was simple and direct: ``I can't wear
the damn things. And besides, you guys aren't in the shoe business. You're
in the fashion business. One day soon you're going to have to start making
conventional shoes.''

Within a year, Burns' prediction had come terribly true. Ironically, it
would be a doctor from the boys' hometown who ripped the sole out of the
negative-heel craze. As Budman told an interviewer from the Detroit Free
Press in 1983, ``We had one store in Birmingham [Mich.] that was selling
close to 700, 800 pairs a week. All of a sudden some Detroit doctor came
out and said the negative heel wasn't good for you. That was it. You could
have shot a cannon in the store the next week and not hit anyone.''

Good thing then that the two owners had taken Burns' suggestion to heart
and had slowly added not just more conventional shoes to the Roots
repertoire, but selected quality leatherwork and clothing as well. Thus,
when the Roots shoe craze went downhill, the Roots company was left with
something to sell, not to mention a tidy fortune to sell it with.

Whatever you want to say about the Roots recessed-heel shoe, its own roots
are planted firmly in the moment that is the mid-Seventies. Suspended
between a sneaker and a dress shoe, the all-occasion Roots shoe fairly
screamed function over fashion. You didn't wear these to look good, you
wore them to feel good.

And that's exactly how the shoe was sold. It was the choice for people who
cared far more about comfort and quality than looking spiffy, for those
simply too tethered to the earthly values of health and well-being to
perch themselves on a pair of towering, Elton John-issue platforms. In a
word, if the Roots shoe conveyed status, it did so through the time-tested
strategy of pitching directly against status.

Indeed, in those days being proudly square was a measure of
self-actualization, a sure sign of the centred self. ``They don't look
like ordinary shoes,'' an early Roots ad reads, ``which bothers some
people. But, if you're secure enough to deal with a few characters who
want to know why you're wearing those `funny-looking shoes' you're going
to love the comfort of Roots.'' There you have it: comfort's conquest of
cool, or maybe comfort's moment as cool.

(A parenthetical pause: the craze died out everywhere but Japan, which
remains the only market for which Roots produces negative-heel shoes. It
seems a fair trade for electronic pets.)

                                      
FC:  Copyright 1999. All rights reserved by original publisher and copyright
holder.  No part of this data may be reproduced, published, sold, 
distributed or stored in any manner other than as sanctioned by law 
or set out in a separate license agreement from the original publisher
and copyright holder.
YC:  1999
UD:  981200