All right. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us here for the 2026 Raymond James Institutional Investor Conference. I'm Rick Patel, Senior Research Analyst covering softlines, retail, global brands, and digital commerce here at Raymond James. I'm thrilled to be hosting Canada Goose, which is a luxury outerwear and lifestyle brand that is sold globally. We're very happy to have Chief Financial Officer Neil Bowden. Thank you, Neil, for being here, and I'll turn the podium over for opening remarks.
Okay, great. Thanks, Rick. We'll just do a little test here. Perfect. Thanks for having us. This is our, this is our third year in a row here at the Raymond James Conference. Had a great day of meetings today, and I look forward to this discussion. Get through the legals. Canada Goose, as a snapshot, Rick just highlighted that we are a luxury performance, lifestyle and outerwear brand. Iconic parkas that many of us know on the streets of New York and London and Tokyo and Toronto. We have evolved greatly since that, and we'll talk a lot about where we're at in terms of the product and brand, today. Just a quick snapshot.
In the year that we closed, now almost 12 months ago, had CAD 1.3 billion of revenue. That is, since IPO, 16% CAGR, so obviously impressive. We closed the third quarter for on a year-to-date basis, sort of consistent with that number. Had a good first nine months of the year, and we're in the midst here of closing out our fiscal year. We have 81 stores today operating across the world. The business roughly splits 40% of revenue in North America, 40% in Asia, and 20% in Europe. We are approximately 75% D2C and 20% wholesale. Within that D2C business, about 75% is stores and 25% e-commerce. Nice mix across each of our sales channels.
Being vertically integrated is a major competitive advantage in our view, and we make most of our products in Canada. All of our down-filled jackets are made in our facilities in Toronto, Winnipeg, or Montreal, or subcontracted somewhere else in Canada. We own a manufacturer in Europe, where we make knitwear, like what I'm wearing, and the rest is mainly sourced in Europe. For our Fiscal 2026, we have been focused on four critical operating imperatives. First one is expanding our product offering and relevance for year-round product. That has been anchored by Haider Ackermann, who is our Creative Director. He's been in the business now almost two years.
Haider has really brought an elevation of style to the Snow Mantra capsule, which has been a relatively small but very impactful capsule of products for the brand. He's now transitioning to our mainline collection for both spring 2026, which is now in the market, and fall/winter 2026, which will be in the market later in this calendar year. As I said, our evolution from parkas and cold weather products rather, to things like knitwear, lightweight down, fleece apparel, et cetera, has been pretty substantial and we're very proud about where the product has come over the last number of years and excited about what there is to come moving forward. Second imperative has been really around marketing investment, building brand heat through focused marketing investments.
We set three objectives this year for marketing. One, increase the overall spending level, which we have done. Two, spread that expense over a more consistent cadence of the year. We've spent in all seasons this year in a substantial way to help elevate the brand. Third, shift the mix of marketing spend in the funnel from lower funnel activity towards the upper funnel with the objective of driving brand heat, and we're very satisfied with the results in all across all areas. Third has been driving the business expansion through focused investment in our D2C channel. As I said, we're at 81 stores. We're gonna when the year is finished this year, we'll open about nine stores. That is a nice number for us.
Critically, we have done that alongside delivering comp store sales. For the first nine months of the year, we are at something like 8% in comp sales, and that's on the back of four consecutive quarters of comp sales. Q4 of last year and into the first three months of this year. Very happy with what the revenue performance has been. In addition to that, we've delivered a more stable operating year in wholesale. Year to date, we're up 3%. We think that there's perhaps a little bit of opportunity there after what has been a couple of years of decline in wholesale and really have restored inventory levels and health across the wholesale network. I'll cover the fourth imperative in a moment.
Here are the, here's the financial snapshot around the investments that we've made in order to drive revenue. First of all, revenue up 10% on a year-to-date basis. D2C revenue up 15%, and included in that is a comp store sales of 7.5%. As I just said, comp sales, not just store sales. Wholesale plus 3%, and gross margin, which is the backbone of the operating strength of this business, 40 basis points of expansion. That's been achieved through a couple of areas. Very little pricing growth this year, which was a deliberate decision earlier in the year. We've seen some positive channel mix, so that's a, that continues to be a positive as this business moves into a more D2C-focused revenue concentration.
That's been moderated a little bit by product mix, which is, you know, perhaps not surprising as we move away from parkas. There's a little bit more pressure on gross margin, intentional and strategic, but that has been one of the, one of the takes. That's been set against, so if we roll that all up, we've seen some operating margin compression this year. There are a handful of effects in there. We had a significant bad debt provision in the third quarter, which related to U.S. wholesaler. That was particularly impactful as well as a significant increase in the marketing investment, as we said. This has been a very deliberate year for investment.
We're quite happy with where we see on the results that we see on the top line. We feel like we're well-positioned moving forward. This is a snapshot of both over the last from Fiscal 2023 through Fiscal 2025 of the progression on both revenue mixed by channel and gross margin. We've seen 200 basis points of margin expansion over the last three years. Again, just real strength of the business in being both vertically integrated as well as good channel distribution. You can see that that's been supported pretty significantly by shift in D2C mix over that period of time. Okay, fourth operating imperative is operating efficiently with pace and accountability.
I think it's very critical, as we've just seen on the gross margin progression, that there's been some significant expansion. I'm just gonna cover where we've been over the last few years, and then we'll sit down and Rick will go through some questions. We exited fiscal 2023 at 14% operating margin. As we got into fiscal 2024, we felt like that was a major opportunity to increase stores, we put a significant number of stores in during that year. As we got towards the end of the year, we made a decision based on what the operating margin profile looked like to reduce costs because we wanted corporate costs to be in the right spot.
That was a critical decision at the back half of fiscal 2024 and into fiscal 2025. Second thing that we did between fiscal 2024 and 2025 was bring Haider into the business. Given where our product life cycle is, Haider started two years ago, we're now just seeing the fruits of that labor in our main line. The third thing that we did was a deliberate focus on inventory discipline. We exited fiscal 2024 with inventory at a relatively high level. Our view was we needed to turn inventory much faster than that and drive the overall dollar balance down. We did that through a degree of production restriction and sold what we had available to us.
We get into fiscal 2025, that year became all about getting the operating principles in place for D2C execution. We had a new head of stores come in place at the beginning of that year. We focused on operating day in, day out inside stores, and that began to deliver positive results with a fourth quarter positive comp story. That has continued through fiscal 2026. This has been a year of investment. We've invested, as I talked about earlier, in marketing, we've invested in stores, and we've built what we think is the right operating model moving forward to deliver margin expansion, which we know we have considerable opportunity for in this business, and we anticipate that we're gonna begin to do that moving forward.
With that, Rick, let's talk.
All right. Well, thank you for that great overview. Let's start with a question on D2C. You've now had four consecutive quarters of D2C, comps being positive, which isn't easy in this environment. What's structurally different about the business today that's driving that consistency, and how do we think about the sustainability of it?
Yeah. I think there's probably three things, and it covers neatly with what I've already talked about. First lever is what product do we have available. As we've been thinking about operating profitable stores and as we've been thinking about moving beyond sort of warm product, we've added product to complement that. Whether it's knitwear, like what I'm wearing today, or footwear, or fleece or things that are for use occasions that are not necessarily just purely in cold weather, that has delivered opportunities for consumers to buy at a point in time when they didn't previously exist. You're able to get, from a product perspective, more productivity out of the store.
Second is ensuring that we've got high levels of traffic. When we talk about what is marketing supposed to do, it's about delivering brand heat, it's about delivering eyeballs to the website or in this case, to the stores. That marketing has led to traffic benefits throughout the world. The last thing is when people arrive in the stores, how do we ensure that we can convert them? Do we have the right number of people in the stores? Do we have them properly incentivized? How are we tracking conversion, et cetera? Some real basic retail 101, which we've been at for, you know, now a couple of years, pretty diligently. All three of those levers are helping to work together to deliver positive comps.
Can we talk about the U.S. market? A lot of noise on the macro front. What are you seeing with this consumer, and where do you see the opportunities for growth?
Yeah. I mean, I think, our experience with the U.S. consumer has been really since post-election a year ago, very strong buying. It doesn't seem to be either localized or hasn't abated in really any way. We've seen really positive performance in stores and in our wholesale partners. You know, I think the sort of noise around how healthy is the consumer seems to be defied by how much spending seems to happen. I, you know, I can't explain why that is. But at least as far as we're concerned, what we've observed in our stores has been just a continuation of strength really here for now, what, you know, what's approaching 15 months.
You've previously talked about the importance of China. Can you frame which inning you're in for distribution? What's brand awareness like, and how should investors think about the remaining levers for growth?
Yeah. I mean, I prefer to answer what innings are we in always by saying early innings because there's opportunity. I, you know, I think that it's a market of a billion for people which is a, you know, also a prolific consumer market, both for luxury goods and regular goods. We feel like there's a ton of white space in China. I would say that in Greater China, we have, I think, 32 stores today, that includes Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Macau. We will open stores next year, and we think there are opportunities in tier one and tier two markets where we either have a presence today or you have an opportunity to get into a new market.
We've got good digital, good presence in the digital ecosystem. The consumer itself appears to be healthy. From a brand perspective, it's a part of the world where we see very strong recognition as a luxury brand. We see that shopper both in domestic purchasing as well as around the world, whether that's Japan or in China, or sorry, in Canada or other parts of the world.
You touched on it, but there's a lot of chatter around the health of the consumer in China. What are you seeing and, you know, what do you think about the market overall? Do you see improvement?
Yeah, I think it's similar to the U.S. market. There seems to be an inconsistent read on the health of the consumer. You know, when we look at what the operating performance looks like in our stores and, you know, kinda what share of market we seem to have, if we look through to individual malls, we feel very good about what our performance looks like, either relative to others or just in absolute terms. I have to read through, you know, what the, what the data says about the consumer in general and look at what the performance is. You know, we love that market and, the consumers seem to love us there.
within softlines, we've heard certain companies entered 2026 calling out softness in areas of Europe. Can you talk about the demand that you've been seeing there? What's working, what's not, and how do we think about the opportunities ahead?
We were probably among those consumers or companies that called out some level of softness. For now, a little while, U.K.'s been a bit of a softer spot for us. It's a place where we've had, you know, long-standing brand strength, deep consumer base, but it seems as though the group of consumers there have been impacted by, you know, local economy or what have you. It's been a little bit softer in the U.K. I'd say, sort of compounding that has been a bit less tourism into that market, or at least a bit less shopping tourism. That seems to have migrated to the continent. We feel good about operating outcomes on the continent itself.
We opened late in the fourth quarter, a new store in Milan or a relocation in Milan, and similarly, at the end of the third quarter, or I'm sorry, at the end of the second quarter, a relocation in Paris. Love where those new stores are. Traffic is good, mix of both domestic and tourist consumer, and so, good, really, you know, quite healthy performance in continental Europe, but U.K. being the soft spot.
You've been very intentional about shifting towards direct-to-consumer. How would you describe the role of D2C versus wholesale in the model today? You know, what optimization still lies ahead?
Just to be clear, you know, from our perspective, both channels are growth opportunities. The wholesale business, which was our core business, going back now, you know, almost a decade or longer, has gone through lots of change sort of outside of the Canada Goose world, and then inside the Canada Goose world, we've experienced some couple difficult years in Fiscal 2024 and Fiscal 2025. This year, as I said, we've stabilized and have delivered through the first nine months of the year, 3% growth. Feels like it's in a pretty healthy spot. We enjoy really strong relationships with our wholesale partners. They love where the brand is going with respect to the product, what Haider's bringing, what we're doing from a merchandising perspective.
That feels like an opportunity really, over the long term, and we're excited about it. Inside the D2C channel, sort of statistically speaking, if about 75% of the business is D2C, most of that has come over time through store growth. We will continue to open stores. I think it's important that those stores, when we underwrite them, have a level of expected performance, which they do, to the extent that we don't think there's a path forward to improve or, where, you know, perhaps the store just doesn't meet the brand profile any longer. You know, we maybe we have a tough decision to make, and we're going through some of those evaluations right now.
If I step back, I think there's still a ton of opportunity in terms of overall number of stores. You know, I think that that will always be the guardrails around that will always be tied to, can we deliver positive comps on a consistent basis, and do we understand how to do that? You know, we feel good about where we've been at the last 12 months or longer and so, future's bright there.
I'd love to dig deeper on operating margins. They've been a big focal point for investors. How do we think about the progress you've made so far? You know, what was intentional in the last results, how does this set up the company for the next phase of margin improvement?
You know, rightly so, I, you know, I think operating margins for us is probably the key to delivering long-term value alongside ensuring that we have stable top-line growth. We need both of those things. We've done a really good job in terms of the top-line growth over a long period of time, but we've seen operating margin compression. The year that we're just about finished was very intentionally about investments, and those investments have led to margin pressure, which has been, for the most part, deliberate. We'll ignore the sort of issue that we've had with respect to the wholesale provision. The rest of the expense lift has really been intentional.
It has been designed to deliver revenue growth, that's where we are here through the end of the third quarter. If I look ahead, you know, what are our opportunities? There's three . One, this is a year where we put lots of dollars in marketing, overall level of investment has increased. We learned a number of things about that, our view is that we can spend about the same number of dollars this year and deliver the same impact, there's operating leverage that can come out of that. If you look at where the corporate costs are today versus where they were several years ago, as I said in my remarks, we've made some tough calls, and feel like we're in a good spot there.
As the scale develops and as growth occurs, we have been able to leverage about 100 basis points in each of the last two years. I'm anticipating that that's gonna continue at a good rate. That's another source of operating leverage. Inside the channels, in the last release, we talked a bit about being maybe over a little over-indexed on store payroll. The balance between ensuring that we have quality folks in our stores available to meet you when you show up, and ensuring that the consumer experience is really good versus how productive is that labor. It's a learning that we've had through the last several months, and so we'll take that away. That's probably the one major source of opportunity inside the channels.
As we set our plans for Fiscal 2027, we'll be pretty focused on ensuring that that comparable sales growth flows through the P&L. Last point I'll make just before we finish is the opportunity on gross margin. You know, puts and takes this year, channel being a good guy, product mix being a little bit of a bad guy. That's without the benefit of any pricing. We didn't take much pricing this year, again, deliberate. I think as we face into Fiscal 2027, we'll take some price increase, and that will happen in the early part of our fiscal year, so sometime after the 31st of March.
Just to follow up on the gross margin point, I know the mix shift towards D2C has been a gross margin tailwind. Is that something that you would expect to continue as well?
Yes. Yeah, I would.
Okay. you know, how do investors think about the outlook for SG&A more broadly, right? You touched on a few of the points there. You know, how do you balance those versus your deliberate efforts to, you know, continue to invest to support the long-term growth?
I mean, I think a couple things are important there. First of all, SG&A as a % of revenue, and so that's everything in, has been a really critical measurement for us. We can acknowledge objectively that number has grown too high over the period of time here. In the last 12 months, we've been deliberate about why that has been, but I'd say prior to that, we were a little less disciplined, and so there's opportunity for us to be a little more disciplined around that total level of SG&A as a percentage of revenue. That means that the investments that are included in there, whether that's marketing or new stores or investments in the digital space or what have you, they all need to have a clear objective, and the return horizon has to be understood.
As we make decisions and govern those decisions and analyze them, we've gotta learn from, you know, making the right trade-offs and the purse strings can only be so big. The objective here as we expand gross margin or continue to expand gross margin has to be that we've got SG&A as a percentage of revenue declining.
On the marketing side of things, you touched on how, you know, that would be flat in CAD. I think about last year, the Snow Goose campaign was very visible in the marketplace. You know, how do you think about the role of marketing going forward in terms of driving that brand heat while still maintaining operational discipline?
I don't think there's any question you can do both. It's helped that we've had greater focus over the last I'll say 24 months on measuring the effectiveness of that. Where we were coming through Fiscal 2025, there was a lot of focus on paid media and the effectiveness of paid media and which channels was that in. That's an easier thing to measure, as most of us know, than top of the funnel. We know that we have to continue to feed that top of the funnel. It grows the consumer base. It helps deliver organic growth and, you know, over long periods of time, can be impactful to your customer acquisition strategy and obviously LTV of the consumer.
Having a clearer understanding of what those marketing dollars do, which we do now, and what measures are important to us, brand heat, organic search activity, momentum in all of our markets, has been a objective for this year, and we feel like we've accomplished that. As we think about rationalizing spend a little bit, at least as a percentage of revenue, we think we can get some leverage out of that without compromising any of those strategic objectives.
We've also heard investor focus, on store openings, and the impact to expenses. Can you just frame how many store openings you've had over the past few years, and how do we think about the pace of new store openings from here?
Sure. In Fiscal 2024, we're in Fiscal 2026 now. In Fiscal 2024, we opened something like 15 stores, which at the time was about 25% of the base, fairly substantial increase in stores. That was, again, intentional to really drive some acceleration into the D2C channel, but created a pretty significant headwind in the P&L that year and in the year that followed. It also compromised, you know, in our view, our ability to really clearly deliver comp store sales, and we did not end that year with strength in comp sales, or I don't think they were positive offhand.
When we get to Fiscal 2025, we gated store openings on the basis of we only have so much capital to allocate, and we need to get our comp performance under control. We opened five last year. This year we're gonna finish something like nine, and that feels like the right healthy balance and obviously, the comp performance is there. As long as that comp performance is there, and, you know, we feel like the capital allocation requirements are met and the, you know, the payback periods and things of that nature, the hurdles are appropriate, then we'll open stores, but it needs to be balanced with operating.
There's a lot of things going on. Maybe just to put it all together, as you, as you look out to the future, you know, what gives you the most confidence about the trajectory of the business?
You know, I'd probably focus on a couple things. First of all, really strong reception to the product. Like, that is the lifeblood of this brand and has been forever. The recognition of both the carryover product that is still phenomenal and people still love alongside what Haider has brought and how the merchandising team has figured out, you know, what the right mix of assortment is. The product piece is really exciting to me, and the response, you know, we start to get indications of response with respect to our spring order book, which is now heading to market, what our order book looks like for next fall. There's a lot of excitement around what's coming. That to me is job one.
Job two is, can we continue to deliver positive comps? We've got, you know, four, or rather how will we deliver positive comps? We've got four quarters in the behind us. Good start to this quarter. We'll see how it finishes obviously, and we'll talk about that in May. I think we've got the right formula there inside the stores and inside our digital channels in order to deliver positive sales. It helps when you have new product that people love. But there's also some basic stuff that you have to do when people arrive in the store to feel like they have a great experience and that they get the product they want, and ensuring you have the inventory there for them to buy as well is critical.
The last piece is the marketing, which is working. For sure there have been periods of time where we've had some really awesome brand heat for Canada Goose. This is another one of those times where we're starting to see things appear in, not just locally, but in North America, but all around the world, that gives us a lot of excitement that the brand is working. That helps on the top line. Then we've got a management job to do, which is to translate that into operating profit and deliver value for the organization and the team.
That's great. Well, appreciate your time and insights, Neil. Thank you. Thank you all for your interest today.
Great. Thanks, Rick.