Good morning, and welcome to this next session of our 33rd Annual Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference. My name is Brooke Roach, and I cover the apparel, accessories, and brand sector here at Goldman Sachs, and I am thrilled to welcome Neil Bowden, CFO of Canada Goose, as our next speaker. Welcome, Neil.
Thanks, Brooke. We have been here several years in a row. It is good to be back in New York in the fall, and good to see you as well.
Excellent. Neil, would you like to kick it off with some opening remarks?
I will make just a short opening remarks. We do not have any slides prepared today. We are obviously a well-known brand. We just had our quarter not too many weeks ago now, although we did have some vacation in between, so it does feel like quite a ways. We are off to a good start this year.
The brand obviously has been focused over the last few years on a few core areas, which I am sure we will touch on. The first is really reinvigorating the brand and building out a year-round product playbook.
The core of those two things has been the introduction of a creative director, Haider Ackermann, who has served as our creative director now for about two years, and emphasis on having amazing luxury product available 365 days a year in all of our stores, websites, and increasingly among our wholesale consumers.
That is where we have been spending our time as a business over these last few years, really, on product and on brand, and then on how we deliver that through our channels, and how we deliver the profitability that this brand has and the potential that it certainly has.
As we think about those three core priorities that you have this year to strengthen brand relevance and drive sustainable growth and profitability, where has Canada Goose made the most meaningful progress so far, and what do you see as the biggest opportunity?
Yeah. So I would say that, and I will go back now a few years, we have spent time in considering both the brand and the product as obviously closely related. As we have gotten into the Snow Goose collection with Haider, and as we have started to elevate product beyond where it was, we focused our attention in terms of the marketing CAD on upper funnel.
How do we expand our reach across consumers? How do we deliver the brand? How do we increase the buzz around the brand? Obviously, the historic sort of iconic logo, the parkas, are what we are closely associated with.
Yet today the products are approximately 50% of the unit sales are not down product. They are things like what I am wearing today, knitwear, they are T-shirts, they are polos. The quality of the products in some of those other areas has really increased as we have started to expand the line, and consumers are adopting them at a really exciting rate.
That's great to hear. There's a lot to pull on there, but maybe we can talk a little bit about marketing for a moment.
Sure.
As you continue to look and build the brand, you're increasing marketing this quarter and next, in particular. What should we expect from the upcoming campaigns? Where are you driving incremental spend by region, and are you seeing any indicators that tell you that this is driving improvement in customer traffic and acquisition?
They don't let, unfortunately, the finance guys break any of the hot news around exactly what the campaigns look like, so I'll let the marketing do the work for itself. But I will talk a little bit about where we're going to spend some time. We're just in our fall/winter collection is in our channels now. We've just started a little.
A couple of weeks ago, we started to get into some of the marketing around that. We're going to quickly move into Snow Goose. We've got holiday coming after that. We've got some exciting partnerships, which will be very interesting and I think really on brand for us, and the team's working hard at that. Much of that work is really focused on that top of the funnel. How do we increase the awareness in every market?
Clearly, we've had a lot of success here over the last several years in both China and in North America, so we're going to put some time and energy into those markets, particular brand activations in each market that are local and relevant to the consumer. Our global brand ambassador, Greg Hsu, who's a Taiwanese actor, very relevant in Asia and increasingly relevant here in North America.
We just had a little bit of a teaser for the fall/winter campaign for him over the last few weeks, and that's an area where we expect to. He's been in the brand now for about 12 months, and so we expect to continue to drive some relevance that way.
Talk to me a little bit more about the product assortment and how it is evolving and where it is going next. You have now had Haider Ackermann in the brand for a couple of years now. Alongside his creative contribution, you have done a lot with lighter weight products, similar to what you said earlier. What do you see as the largest product and category opportunities from here?
Certainly, we feel confident about all categories, so I will just make that kind of blanket statement to start. The brand obviously is really well known for our down product, whether that is sort of the parkas, and there are many iconic styles, but also some newness that we have seen come into the brand here under Haider's direction.
Alongside that, obviously, lightweight down, very popular and a large piece of our portfolio. Increasingly, the growth has come from knitwear, fleece, and accessories have started to round that out. As we have been thinking about what the merchandising, what the assortment looks like, we have really been focused on having luxury product available all around the world for your need state.
The consumers, regardless of where you are in the world, we want you to be thinking about Canada Goose, whether you are on your way to a soccer game or having brunch with your friends or outside at a park in the spring, or yesterday, I was walking around Manhattan in the heavy rain with my wife in our really amazing raincoats. There is an opportunity for Canada Goose product 365 days of the year.
That is really great to hear. Are these category extensions driving increased purchasing frequency and spend among existing customers, or do you think that it is primarily bringing new customers into the brand?
In your last question, you sort of asked about Haider. Haider has been with us for about two years. He started with our pinnacle product collection called Snow Goose. His influence has now extended into our mainline collections. The spring collection that we sort of have just finished, was the first mainline collection that Haider touched, and now the fall winter is in place.
We are seeing consumers that are new to the brand, as well as repeat consumers gravitating towards those products. Really, that is such a great story and a powerful part of our opportunity, we think, where we have now got products that perhaps you were not looking at Canada Goose for one reason or another, that Haider has really influenced.
You have got a new color that you maybe were not looking at, or you have something that is just the right style that perhaps a few years ago was not exactly what you were looking for. You have now got a reason to come in, and Haider has really brought that. If you are an existing consumer and you have got your parka and for a period of time you decided, "I am not sure I need to go back to Canada Goose," we now see a lot more excitement around things like polos.
You are there in the summer to acquire one or two colors of a polo or a T-shirt or something else that is at the standard that you expect from the brand. Really, we are seeing both that growth and repeat as well as new.
That is great to hear. As you scale some of these warmer weather categories or non-heavyweight down categories, what is the current margin profile of those lighter weight versus heavyweight categories, and what levers do you have to offset mix pressure?
This is a question we have heard a number of times, given that, not surprisingly, parkas have the highest gross margin on a per unit basis. I think early on as we were getting into some of these other categories, there was a much wider, and not a major, but there was a wider difference between lower margin products and higher margin products.
As we have started to evolve our sourcing function, as we have matured our merchandising function, we have really been focused on ensuring that the gap between highest margin and lowest margin products tightens. There is good reason sometimes to accept maybe a slightly lower margin, let us just say lightweight down product, for instance, if it is the right spot in the assortment. We have made, I would say, those decisions over the last few years in a much more scientific way.
But generally speaking, the margins at a category level have really, really tightened, and you can see that it's been one of the reasons that we've been able to expand gross margin over the last 10 years very meaningfully as we've started to mix out of core parkas.
And obviously, we're getting some benefit on a channel basis because of the channel mix, but inside the channels, you can see that gross margin expanding over a long period of time. And we believe that there's still opportunity to do that as the volumes get larger, even as we move into some of those other categories. And naturally, you're going to see some AUR compression, but we should be able to continue the pace that we're at.
That's really great to hear. Let's dive into another area of strategic opportunity, which is the DTC store productivity.
Sure.
Retail execution's been such a major area of investment for Canada Goose the last few years. What's driving some of the improvements that you're seeing in store today, and how should investors assess current store productivity? If you have any metrics you can share on per square foot, four-wall profitability or returns on the stores, that would be great.
Yeah. I'll start with the two that we obviously look at most frequently. So one is sales per square foot. We have said lots of times, over our time, and those who are familiar with the story will have heard this, and if you're not, hearing this for the first time, our expectation is that our stores deliver CAD 4,000 a square foot, at least.
And that has not always been the case. We report this on an annual basis, and so when we closed fiscal 2026 in March, that was the first year in a few years that we had ticked above that number across the fleet. We had strong comps through fiscal 2026, the back half or the last quarter for sure of fiscal 2025. And so, getting back to that level was important.
We believe there's plenty of opportunity beyond that as we start to build out more concentration in some of these periods of time that isn't necessarily what we treat as our peak period. There is opportunity to continue to drive that, but that is not every store, and that means that there's opportunity in those stores specifically.
Second area of focus is really around per store profitability, and so having our EBIT margin at 40% is sort of our minimum gating threshold at the moment. That is, of course, not always the case across a fleet of 90 stores. Where we're not where we expect to be, we focus on things like, which gets to the core of the question here, how do we drive the right level of labor necessary to meet the traffic?
What are we doing to incent our brand ambassadors to ensure that they're delivering whatever it is that's necessary in that period of time, whether that's a heavyweight down steam or whether it's something about T-shirts or whatever the program is for that particular week or month.
Really drilling into core behavior consistency across the store network. We've got a head of retail now and three presidents absolutely focused on consistency and meeting the standards everywhere in the world. It's not a perfectly straight line. We didn't have, I would say, quite the performance in the first quarter that we would like.
That obviously gears us up to continue to focus on that, but we think that store comps, and we report comps, but store comps in particular, are absolutely tied to long-term value creation, and lots of us are spending a ton of time focused on getting better at that every day.
Well, let's talk a little bit more about what opportunities you have within this initiative for the holiday season. What should we be expecting as you gear up into your peak selling season?
We're certainly focused on a few things. Selling behavior. When you're in the store, are you feeling that Canadian warmth? Is that consistent? Are we showing you multiple products? Are we trying to push a UPT above one? Units per transaction above one.
If you're going to buy a polo, can we get you to buy two or three instead of one to drive that average basket size up? That's sort of the core focus. Do we have the right labor in place? Do we have the right labor to match the traffic?
Over the last 12 or 15 months, we've talked a lot about labor investment and ensuring that we've got good analytics around what the traffic forecast looks like. How do we match manager and brand ambassador availability and the number of staff on hand in order to meet the demand?
Obviously peak for us is a big period, and there's lineups at the stores in lots of places, including on Fifth Avenue, I'm sure soon. Do we have the inventory in the right place? We talked a little bit already about making this phenomenal product.
Is it there? Is it available to you? If it's not, what can we do to have that shipped to you quickly so that you've got that in your hand? All of those three areas are places where we know we've got opportunity, and I think we feel like we've got a good plan entering our peak.
Let's shift to your other major channel, which is wholesale.
Sure.
How are you thinking about wholesale growth on a multi-year basis? On a near-term basis, how has sell-in and sell-through developed, and what are you hearing from your partners regarding the health of the brand, forward orders, reorders, and cancellations?
Yeah, I will start at the back at the last part of that question. We have just come through over the last few months our spring/summer sell-in for next year. We are delivering now this fall/winter. Most of it is now delivered, although there is still usually a few weeks to go. Really, really happy with the interest in the product in particular.
I think by and large, there has been a desire from wholesalers as well as consumers, and obviously the wholesalers are speaking on behalf of the consumers for Canada Goose product that extends beyond just the core season, and we are seeing a lot of interest in the buyers for that product.
I think that is a great indicator of brand health. Frankly, long overdue. We have talked a lot, Brooke, you and I, about where the wholesale business has come. It was the core of the business many years ago.
We had a couple challenging years there through FY 2024 and FY 2025. Stabilized over last year with a little bit of growth. We feel like there is growth to come in wholesale this year as well, and so we really like where that is headed. I think it is probably too early really to talk a little bit about sell-in or sell out.
I think anecdotally it looks okay, but it is not perfect everywhere. Europe is a market that continues to be under some pressure. Although I was in London and Paris for the last few weeks on vacation, but in some of those major retailers, and I liked what I saw in terms of the interest in. Broadly speaking, this is one day, one hour, but was of interest to me that there was people in places like Galeries Lafayette or La Samaritaine or Harrods.
It does seem to be that there are people willing to shop, but I do not want to draw any conclusions on that. We are too early in our season so far to really draw any strong conclusions about sell-out. But I think we like where we are positioned. We like the product. We know the wholesalers like the product. So our job is just to make sure it is in their hands on time.
You mentioned the macro, so maybe we can dive a little bit deeper there.
Sure.
One of the bigger debates coming out of last quarter on Canada Goose was the traffic that you were seeing by region.
Yeah.
You reported double-digit e-com growth, healthy customer acquisition, and better conversion, but that weaker traffic really was a bit of an offset. What's your latest assessment of the macro operating environment by region, and are you seeing any signs of improvement or stabilization?
Yeah. We're, as you can appreciate, getting a little bit deep into our quarter, so I'm going to just comment more generally rather than any specifics. I will say as we exited Q1, we're not really happy with where the traffic is. I think it's probably true that we're experiencing some declines. We saw some declines in traffic in retail in particular.
We saw lots of improvement in e-commerce, and so understanding that relationship has been interesting. Clearly, there's interest that folks are attracted to the website, and they're spending some time across our digital platforms regardless of where we're in the world, and so we take that as a positive. Our wholesale traffic seemed to be pretty good as well through the first quarter, and so there was a little bit of head scratching around retail.
I think as we look at the macro now, it continues to be tough in Europe. No surprise, despite what I said about what I saw on the streets of Paris and London. North America is okay. There are pockets where there is good, strong, repeatable traffic. Obviously, we had some experience here through back to school season.
It is not perfect everywhere. China remains a market that is a little bit mixed. Regardless of what the traffic environment is, our job is to convert. We are focused on, obviously, top of the funnel brand work. How does that translate to traffic over a period of time, as you indicated? We were a little bit lighter on marketing in the first half of the first quarter.
We are expecting to ramp that up in the second quarter and have done so, and we will continue to do that over the balance of the year. We know that is going to translate to some traffic improvement, but our core focus is on what are we doing when you arrive in our stores. What does our website look like? How well merchandised are we? Is the product available for you? The things that we know will translate to success.
One question that we are asking every company at our conference today is on the health of the consumer. What are your expectations for the environment over the balance of 2026 relative to your recent results? Do you expect things to be the same, better, or worse? For 2027, do you expect the health of the consumer to be better, the same, or worse in 2027 versus 2026?
Yeah. On that last point, if I sat here, I do not know what, we could look at the transcript of what I said 12 months ago, but I think we felt pretty good 12 months ago about the health of the consumer, and we have had, obviously, an escalation in tariffs, which I am sure we are going to get to, and a war in Iran that was not on the horizon.
So I am not sure I am in a situation where calendar 2027, fiscal 2028 for us, it is way too early to comment. I am hopeful that some of those things will be less of de-escalated, but you just never know.
I think for the balance of the year and what we said when we got into our plan for the year and what we based our guidance on was a consumer environment that was probably a little bit worse than calendar 2025 or fiscal 2026. Through the first quarter, nothing changed my view of that. I think there's clearly some buying.
There are markets where stock markets are performing very well, and affluence seems to be leading to spending in an unmitigated way. We're happy with what we see in some places, but it's mixed, and I'm expecting some of that challenge to continue.
That's helpful. One other very topical question that's related to traffic is that of weather.
Yeah.
There are some forecasters out there calling for a super El Niño pattern, which could change cold weather temps into the back half of the year. How are you planning the business for this possibility, and how does your business typically perform during these periods?
If tariffs isn't the most popular word in the last couple of months, then super El Niño has got to be on that list. I've learned a lot about those weather patterns. Listen, appears to me to be transitory. If it is in fact something that will happen this year, then it happens. Our view is today, we are in many markets that are non-traditional cold weather markets.
We've got product that is available for all year round. As we've seen in our non-peak season, consumers love that product. We've seen tons of growth in apparel. Our job is when you come into the store to make sure that you've got the right product for you, and we know we have that inventory. The quality of it is exceptional.
Listen, it is not factored into our business plan this year, and our job is really to continue to attract interest based on the products that we have, and we are excited about that.
Very clear. You have mentioned tariffs multiple times now, and I know that it is very much on investors' minds, so maybe we can move there. You had indicated on the last call that higher U.S. tariffs on Canadian imports could represent less than 200 basis points of pressure on this fiscal year before mitigation.
What would the impact look like on an annualized basis, and how much of the current year effect is limited by inventory already in the United States? Can you walk us through how you are thinking about current tariffs?
Sure. Yeah. I did not mean to indicate tariffs, but that is just a reality, and I did not think I would get away without having a chat about it. So that is no surprise. Listen. Yeah, our view of this year is less than 200 basis points of impact. I am not prepared to give an annualized number. I think that depends on size of the business in the U.S., how much product do we have in the market, a number of other factors.
As we get into, and obviously we are planning ahead for next year at this point, when the time is right, we will talk about what the annualization would look like and specifically, to the extent that it matters to fiscal 2027, what that looks like. Fiscal 2028, rather. So I am going to punt on that. Mitigation strategies, we make inventory all year round.
We have got an active retail network and e-commerce network in the U.S. We have got wholesalers in the U.S. We have inventory staged earlier or throughout the year, and so some of the mitigation had already happened regardless of the impact of tariffs.
Our main mitigation prior to was to ensure that we had whatever we could in the market at the time, and we have continued to ship, obviously, because we have got stores to replenish and that sort of thing. That is all factored into our calculation of what the impact is in the current year.
What about future mitigation levers? Can you talk through how we might think about the future mitigation once the product that's in the U.S. is already exhausted?
Yeah. I think the obvious one, which we're not going there yet, is what does pricing look like, and it's way too early to make any comment or any decision on that. We've got a tremendous relationship with U.S. consumers, and I think our objective is to continue to maintain that and the loyalty that they've shown us with that to the brand.
We're not at this time considering any significant change in pricing, and certainly not in the year. I think our long-term view of where manufacturing is continues to be, it should be in Canada for down product, and as we've talked about, we make lots of things in Europe, and tariffs is a part of product made in Europe being imported in the U.S., and has been for a long time. That's just part of our business as it is elsewhere.
Driving retail economics and some cost savings to offset what might be some gross margin compression is another way that we can help mitigate. Because this is obviously so topical, we're not interested in any sort of rash reaction, and we're monitoring the situation as we often are, and we're hopeful there's a good resolution.
One question that we're asking all companies at this conference is on prices and AUR. Do you expect your prices and AUR to be higher, lower, or the same in the back half of calendar 2026 versus the level of AUR growth that you delivered in the first half?
Then maybe associated with that, do you believe that the brand is in a strong position to be able to continue to increase prices now that you've gotten back to your normal cadence this year?
Yeah. I certainly think we do have some pricing power. I think that goes very closely with what are we doing around the brand and what does that brand mean to consumers? How amazing are these products? Maybe there's a little more opportunity on newness than core, but that remains to be seen.
And obviously, we take data on how we perform throughout the year and things like indicators from wholesale order books and that sort of thing, to inform future pricing decisions and what's the health of the market more generally and that sort of thing. So I think those factors are all considered when we make pricing decisions. First part of your question.
AUR and pricing.
Yeah.
Higher, lower, or the same in the back half of the year?
Yeah. Not surprisingly for us, we expect higher AUR growth in the back half of the year because we start to shift away from some of those lower AUR products and into more core seasonal. We took price growth this year as opposed to last year, so that's a natural evolution.
But we certainly are seeing some pressure, let's just say, on AUR in terms of the math by having lower AUR product more available at this time of year. And so there'd be a little bit of that pressure, I suspect, as people are starting to buy things like knitwear and fleece and apparel, lower AUR product even during our core season. And so that certainly puts some pressure on it, but that's pressure that we're okay with.
The other big debate in the stock is on SG&A leverage. I was hoping you could dive a little bit deeper into the principal drivers of expected SG&A leverage in the back half. How much of that leverage depends on an improvement in traffic? How much is in your control, and how should we be thinking about that ahead?
Yeah. I think the good news is that, we expect to get SG&A leverage out of a couple spots. One of them for sure is to maintain a level of spending that's appropriate, and the growth in that spending has to be lower than the growth in overall revenue. We plan for revenue growth of low single digits this year.
We're expecting SG&A to be less than in order for us to have some leverage, even in a somewhat pressured top-line growth scenario. The primary way that we maintain or contain growth in SG&A spend there is headcount related.
We've been very tight on headcount addition really over the last few years, and that's translated nicely to some SG&A leverage. The other area is we need to see, obviously, revenue growth in the channels. Naturally, that comes best from comp growth.
Revenue growth just more generally in the channels, which we absolutely expect to deliver, will also translate to some SG&A leverage. We're looking at both those things. Clearly, we're going to invest in stores.
We've got a marketing plan that will be an increase in CAD, a little bit of a lowering of spend as a percentage of revenue. There's a tiny bit of leverage there, but mainly it's maintaining a level of cost, or growing a level of cost at a rate that's lower than overall revenue growth.
From a cost perspective, one other margin question that we're asking every company at the conference this year is on margin headwinds and tailwinds into calendar 2027. Do you expect to see more margin headwinds or tailwinds in calendar 2027 versus 2026? Can you elaborate on the drivers?
Yeah. Again, we're not quite into Calendar 2027. For us is a big chunk of our fiscal 2028. We're not in a position to comment about our plans for fiscal 2028 quite yet. I would say that we believe absolutely that there are margin tailwinds in this business.
We've got to get through our big season here in Q3 for fiscal 2027. When we get into that fiscal 2028 planning, we'll talk a little bit more about it. I think you've heard us say a number of times, and we believe strongly that there is a lot of opportunity in this business to grow margin.
Let's dive a little bit deeper into that long-term opportunity to grow margin. Beyond fiscal 2027, what are the key milestones required to move EBIT margin meaningfully higher to where you used to be? How should investors think about the relative contribution opportunity from gross margin expansion relative to SG&A leverage?
I think gross margin is probably a Gross margin is absolutely fundamental part of the plan, but the growth in gross margin is probably less than the SG&A leverage story, just if I think about the way the math works. We're running gross margins around 70%. I think there's opportunity beyond that.
Growing the absolute dollars of gross profit and obviously growing revenue dollars helps provide leverage without doing anything in SG&A. Clearly revenue growth translating to gross profit dollar growth, regardless of how much gross margin you get, helps leverage that total SG&A pool.
But keeping a handle on SG&A corporate cost spend is critical. We will absolutely invest in marketing because we know that that is a direct translation to performance in the channels as well as the overall brand metrics that we know that we need to drive.
Having SG&A corporate costs under control is key to providing overall leverage. Inside the channels, ensuring that we've got the right mix of investment in new stores, that the stores are delivering productivity at and above the levels that we talked about earlier, 40% at a per store basis. Those are all part of the story, and we're focused on each of those individually.
Is AI a contributor to the long-term growth? Do you expect AI to drive a significant increase in efficiency in 2027 versus 2026? What part of the business do you expect AI to change most meaningfully?
Yeah. I'd hesitate to overstate the benefit of it at the moment. We are certainly utilizing it in a number of different areas. I don't think we're quite at the stage yet where we're seeing a massive amount of cost efficiency, let's say. It's an area of, I'd say, human capital investment, and so where we're experimenting with the tools that we have available to us, we're spending some human time on that.
There are certain pockets of the business where I see future opportunity. This customer-facing stuff is one of the most interesting areas. Things like warranty, live agent, that sort of thing, where clearly there's a translation to We're not breaking new ground here, and so that's an area where naturally we can see some leverage and potentially some operating leverage. I wouldn't want to overstate the opportunity around AI. I think there's still a lot to do. We've got plenty to do in the core operating areas first.
Neil, we're about out of time. Any closing thoughts or comments that you'd like to leave with the audience?
No, I think as we enter our peak, we are pretty excited about what plans are in front of us. We have got a lot of work to do. We will be in the market with our second quarter here in the early part of November, and we will be excited to update the broader investor and analysts and other stakeholder group at that time. We have got plenty in front of us for FY 2027. We are going to head back to work.
Great. Thanks so much for joining us, Neil.
Great. Thank you, Brooke.