Preservation vs Authorship: The Roots Story
CAFÉ MANSHA | ISSUE NO. 3
What must each successor preserve, and what they must author?
By Jagneet Malhotra
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I almost forgot about Roots until a friend told me it was for sale.
That bothered me. I still liked the name, the beaver, the varsity jackets, the salt and pepper sweats, the Olympic years. I just couldn't tell you the last time Roots pulled me into a store. Somewhere along the way I'd started assuming the company was doing fine because of its heritage, which is the same assumption I watch second generation owners make about their own businesses, usually a while before the numbers force the conversation.
So I looked up what the market thought. Everything that follows comes from public sources, filings, press releases, results and news coverage, since I've no relationship with Roots and no inside knowledge of any of it. By July 2026, Roots had an enterprise value of roughly C$250 million. Canada Goose was worth about C$1.7 billion. Aritzia, about C$16.4 billion. Lululemon, close to C$20 billion converted into Canadian dollars. Roots was sitting at 14.7 per cent of Canada Goose, 1.5 per cent of Aritzia, and 1.25 per cent of Lululemon.
Enterprise value can't measure affection or national pride or the place a brand holds in someone's childhood. It measures what investors think the business becomes next. On that measure, the company I'd been carrying around in my head didn't exist, and I found myself wondering which of us was wrong, the market or my memory.
Think about the neighbourhood restaurant that fed three generations and covered a meal when money was tight. Everyone nearby would tell you it's an institution, but if the founders never built a succession plan it still gets sold or shuttered. Sam the Record Man. The El Mocambo. Hudson's Bay on a national scale. The next generation inherits a sign and a story and no working way to take part in whatever made either one matter.
Which raises a question I hadn't thought to ask before.
Should a heritage brand be preserved like a building, or stewarded like a living culture?
We protect heritage buildings and train stations and neighbourhoods because we've decided they belong to more than whoever holds the deed today. We don't do that with brands. Trademark law protects the logo and the name and who's allowed to use them, and it protects nothing at all against a brand quietly falling out of the culture. But the distinction gave me a cleaner way in. A building survives because somebody preserves it. A brand survives only if each generation chooses to take part again.
That's a very different inheritance, and it's the one most of our clients are actually handing down, whether or not they'd describe it that way.
I thought I knew the Roots story. I didn't know the first product was a shoe. Michael Budman and Don Green met at Camp Tamakwa in Algonquin Park, opened their first Toronto store in 1973, and introduced the Sport Root, a negative heel shoe that sold out within weeks. The company grew out of a very specific reading of Canada: nature, comfort, craftsmanship, friendship, home. Then leather, the Toronto factory, fleece, the beaver, the Olympic years.
This is where the word heritage stopped being simple for me. When we say Roots has heritage, what are we pointing at? The shoe, the factory, the logo, the values underneath them? Or is it Budman and Green's ability to look at the country in front of them and turn it into something people wanted to wear and belong to? Preserving the founder's last answer isn't the same as preserving how the founder learned to see, and almost nobody sorts that out before the transfer. I've sat with families who spent a year debating a product line the founder's instinct produced in the nineties, treating the output as the inheritance instead of the instinct.
The Olympics made this concrete for me. Roots outfitted Canadian teams through some of the country's biggest shared moments, and the rest of us got to feel like participants. When Hudson's Bay replaced Roots after the 2004 Games, the beaver didn't become unfamiliar overnight. What vanished was the recurring occasion for Canadians to make new memories with it.
Recognition and participation aren't the same asset, and only one of them is easy to inherit. A child recognizes the family name and an employee repeats the values in a meeting, and neither has yet found a place for themselves in what comes next.
Which is the tension that surfaces on every page of the Roots story. Preservation protects what made the business worth inheriting, and left to run the show it turns the business into a careful display of its best years. Authorship asks what those values should produce now, and left unchecked it produces something perfectly current and indistinguishable from anything else on the shelf. The useful question isn't how to split the difference. It's the one I now ask families before we talk about structure.
What still has to remain true, and what now needs a new expression?
Searchlight Capital Partners took control of Roots in 2015, describing it as a heritage brand with room to grow domestically, internationally and across more channels. Budman and Green kept a minority stake and stayed involved.
I first read that as a straightforward handoff from founders to private equity. It isn't. Budman and Green had to convince a country to care. Searchlight arrived at a country that already did, which sounds like the easier job and may not be, because creating meaning and scaling meaning ask for almost opposite temperaments. What I still can't tell from the outside is whether the founders chose Searchlight as the right steward, partly for its Canadian ties, or whether the number did most of the deciding. I ask founders that question directly now, because the answer tends to predict the next ten years better than anything in the purchase agreement.
Two years later, in October 2017, Roots went public at C$12 a share. I assumed the IPO put money into the company. It didn't. Searchlight and the founders sold roughly C$200 million of their existing shares and Roots received none of it. Searchlight went from about 80 per cent to 47.7 per cent, the founders from about 20 per cent to 12. Secondary offerings are ordinary and there's nothing improper in that, but it reframes the transaction. Public investors were funding the future growth of Roots through a deal that mostly delivered liquidity to the people already holding it, and the company took on the reporting load that comes with being public, which costs money and, more to the point, attention.
The person executing all of this was Jim Gabel, and until I went looking I couldn't have told you his name. Searchlight's board hired him in February 2016, weeks after taking control. He had no history with Budman and Green. He came from Wolverine Worldwide, where he ran Saucony, Merrell and Chaco, and before that he was president of Adidas Canada and then Reebok North America. On paper he was exactly right, a man who had scaled recognizable brands in bigger markets, hired by owners who wanted a recognizable brand scaled into bigger markets.
In April 2018 he put a number on the ambition. "We believe the U.S. represents a minimum 100 store market opportunity for us." Roots had four American stores at the time. It opened Washington, Boston, Chicago and an outlet at Woodbury Common, and by fiscal 2019 the U.S. business was losing about C$6 million a year at the EBITDA line. The IPO prospectus had promised fiscal 2019 sales of C$410 to C$450 million. Actual sales came in at C$330 million, and the year closed with a net loss of C$62 million, most of it write offs on goodwill and on those American stores. From its May 2018 peak the stock fell about 85 per cent.
Jim didn't price the IPO; the selling shareholders did. He didn't invent the growth thesis either. He was hired to execute one that already existed, by a private equity owner with a clock running. Canadian mall traffic fell more than twenty per cent between 2018 and 2019, two winters came in warm, which is a real problem when a meaningful share of your business is fleece, and Hong Kong went into protest as the Asian business wobbled with it.
So the question I'm left with is narrower, and I'd put it to almost any hired chief executive rather than to him alone.
When the stores were losing money and guidance had already been cut once, what makes a steward hold a position instead of stopping?
Not the original bet. The persistence. A founder can reverse himself in public because nobody can remove him for it. Someone hired to deliver a strategy is being watched by the people who chose it, and I don't know how much room that leaves. It's the part of the job we almost never discuss when we hand a family business to a professional.
On January 3, 2020, Roots issued a release saying Gabel "has left the Company, effective immediately." It gave no reason. The chairman thanked him for his many contributions and said the board believed Roots "requires renewed leadership." Gabel wasn't quoted, and as far as I can find he's never publicly said a word about any of it. Four years of decisions that shaped what every successor would inherit, and the public record is a press release that doesn't say why. I keep wondering what the next steward is owed by the last one.
Which brings us to Meghan Roach. She arrived from Searchlight, where she was a managing director, and she sat on the Roots board from 2015 to 2017, through the acquisition and the run up to the IPO. She came back as interim CFO in August 2019, became interim CEO the week Gabel left, and was made permanent in May 2020. So the same owner and the same board that authored the strategy supplied the person sent to correct it. That's ordinary in private equity rather than scandalous, but it does mean the correction was designed by people with a stake in how the original was remembered.
What she did is real. COVID closed the stores in her first quarter. She put the U.S. subsidiary into liquidation in April 2020 and closed the money losing locations, cut promotional days from 213 in fiscal 2019 to 140 and then to 23, and improved inventory, margins, debt and operations, with sales and comparable sales growing again by fiscal 2025. She refused to let Roots die during a retail pandemic, and that isn't nothing.
What I keep turning over is the clock. That's six years. In those same six years Lululemon built communities around movement and discipline and kept showing up where those habits were actually lived. Aritzia offered customers new versions of themselves to wear as their work and social lives changed. Canada Goose took Canadian performance and attached it to achievement, exploration and global culture. Three different plays, one shared feature: something to take part in now rather than something to remember.
So the question I'd put to her is the mirror of the one I'd put to Gabel, and I'm not sure it has a fair answer.
After six years of repair, what was there room to author?
The Outpost on Yonge Street is the best answer I found and it's one store. Meanwhile the strategic review announced in March 2026 tells you the shareholder is looking for an exit, and a company being prepared for sale and a company being built for the next generation aren't always the same company. The first rewards a clean set of books. The second rewards spending money now on things that pay off after you've gone. I don't know which one she was running, and I'm not convinced she got to choose. That may be the most useful thing in this story for anyone handing a business to a hired steward: the person who arrives to fix what someone else broke may never get to author anything, because by the time the repair is done the owner wants out.
Roots had loyalty through all of it, much of it sitting with millennials who grew up with the brand and kept buying out of memory. Loyal customers will carry a business a long way, and they'll also disguise the fact that nobody's arriving behind them. I see it constantly in professional practices and family businesses, a client base that renews reliably every year and has been slowly aging for fifteen.
Roots has tried to answer that. In 2023 it appointed Joey Gollish, founder of Mr. Saturday, as its first outside Creative Director in Residence, and there were collaborations with Seth Rogen and with Zanmang Loopy, a Korean character with a much younger audience. Whether any of it created participation is a different question from whether it created attention, and it's unfair to hang that on one creative director or one capsule. What Gollish inherited wasn't the balance sheet or the leases. It was permission to reinterpret what Roots is allowed to mean, which raises something I can't settle.
Can creativity be appointed? Can a company manufacture participation, or only build better conditions for people to choose it?
A collaboration can make someone laugh, or collect a piece, or walk into a store once. Participation asks the customer to see an ongoing place for themselves, which is why the loyal customer and the untapped customer can't be served by the same idea. Stay out of the conversation long enough and people stop checking whether you're in it.
The Toronto factory is preservation you can stand inside, keeping a piece of the founding story literally true even though most Roots product is now made elsewhere. The newer collections sit on the other side of the ledger. Modern silhouettes, minimal logos, pieces you could wear to an office. That reaches people who don't want a beaver across their chest, and it also nudges Roots toward clothing that could have come from anywhere.
How do you update the expression without removing the reason anyone cared?
The Outpost is the closest thing to an answer I found. It brought the brand back to the neighbourhood of the first store and put old images and vintage pieces beside contemporary Canadian art, local goods and programming. It didn't try to reproduce 1973. It asked what the founders' values would build today.
That's how artists handle succession, incidentally. Nobody asks a young painter to preserve the Mona Lisa, because the museum handles that. The painter studies what came before, absorbs the discipline behind it, and makes something for the world actually in front of her. In family business the expectation can run the other way. Preservation reads as respect and reinterpretation reads as disloyalty. I understand why, because a reckless successor can burn jobs and trust and a family name in about two years. But preservation carries a quieter risk, which is that a business loses contact with the world around it. So the successor's real job may not be choosing between the two. It may be understanding the inheritance well enough to know where each one belongs.
Which brings us back to the sale, and to the fact that it now has an answer. On August 20, 2026, Roots agreed to go private. Marquee Brands, a New York brand management company backed by Neuberger Berman, is acquiring it through JM&A Design and Development, a Canadian operating partner led by Joe Mimran, who founded Joe Fresh and co-founded Club Monaco, and the retail veteran Frank Rocchetti. Shareholders receive C$4.10 a share in cash, roughly C$160 million in total, a 36 per cent premium to where the stock sat the day before the strategic review was announced. Searchlight and the other large holders have agreed to vote in favour, the board has unanimously recommended it, and closing is targeted for the fourth quarter. JM&A will run design, manufacturing, distribution and the North American stores. Marquee will handle global brand stewardship and new categories.
I'll leave the deal analysis to people closer to it. What I'd point out is the shape of it. A few paragraphs ago I said it'd be a sad outcome if the beaver became a licensing mark inside a brand group. Marquee is, by construction, a brand group, with a portfolio that runs from Martha Stewart to BCBG to Roberto Cavalli. And yet the structure hands day to day authorship to a Canadian operator who has built brands from here before, which is close to the opposite of what I feared. Both things are true at once, and which one ends up mattering is the question this whole piece has been circling. Whether Roots can reach the heights of its peers under this ownership group remains to be seen.
A founder, an investor, a hired chief executive, a creative director and a customer don't inherit the same responsibility. The owner decides what the company is permitted to become, the chief executive decides what gets time and attention, the creative director decides how the story gets expressed, and the customer decides whether any of it earns their participation. Every one of them is part of the succession, and every one of them can preserve something, author something, or quietly let the invitation lapse.
Which is why this story matters to anyone stepping into a second or third generation. By the time responsibility reaches you, the company usually isn't the one your parents built. The customers are different, the market has moved, and the family may want things from the business it was never designed to give. You're inheriting the trust they created, the constraints they accumulated, and an unspoken expectation that the thing should still matter tomorrow.
So before the valuation, before the structure, before the transition timeline: what exactly have you inherited?
A strategy that should continue, or a set of values that needs a new expression? Are people still taking part in what you have, or do they only recognize the symbols?
I started this wondering how Roots could possibly be for sale. I'm still not certain whether the company was once more remarkable than it is now, or whether my memory inflated it. What the story made clear is the size of the responsibility sitting there for whoever takes it next.
When something people care about passes through your hands: what must you preserve, what are you now responsible for authoring, and why should the next generation choose to participate?
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Continue the Story
Roots Corporation. The August 2026 go private agreement with Marquee Brands and JM&A Design and Development, the March 2026 strategic review, fiscal 2018, 2019 and 2025 results, the 2017 IPO prospectus, and leadership announcements including the February 2016 appointment of Jim Gabel, the January 2020 appointment of Meghan Roach, and the 2023 appointment of Joey Gollish.
Marquee Brands and JM&A Design and Development. Transaction materials and portfolio disclosures from the August 2026 announcement.
Searchlight Capital Partners. Acquisition materials from the 2015 purchase and subsequent ownership.
The Globe and Mail, Canadian Press and CBC News. Coverage of Roots from the IPO through the leadership change and the 2026 sale.
Deloitte Canada. The Future of the Mall (July 2020), on Canadian mall traffic through the period.
Roots. Our Story, Sport Root, We Are Makers and Roots Outpost materials, and Canadian Olympic Committee archival material on the Olympic era.
S&P Global Market Intelligence and the Bank of Canada. July 2026 enterprise values and USD/CAD rates.
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CAFÉ MANSHA | Issue No. 3
