Canada Goose and the Goose People

A parka on the summit of Everest

On 5 October 1982, at 9:30 in the morning local time, Laurie Skreslet became the first Canadian to reach the summit of Mount Everest, as a member of the 1982 Canadian Mount Everest Expedition.¹ Canada Goose's own history records that he was wearing a custom parka designed and manufactured by Metro Sportswear, and that this "Big Mountain" jacket was re-released in 2011 as the Skreslet Parka.²

Skreslet is the earliest name in what Canada Goose later called its Goose People. He was associated with the brand because of what he had done in its product, not because many people knew his face. The company later gave the people it chose this way a name of their own: Goose People.³

Ambassadors chosen by conditions

The roster that grew from that model was built from the same kind of person. Canada Goose describes partnering in the 2000s with the musher Lance Mackey, who won the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest dog sled races four times each. Its history calls Ray Zahab a "Goose Person" when it records his 2009 Guinness record for an unsupported trek to the South Pole, on foot and without skis, in 33 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes.² Bloomberg's Joe Nocera described the company's ambassadors as including a champion dogsledder, an extreme adventure athlete and a polar explorer.³

For an outerwear brand, these people work as a test laboratory held in public. A celebrity transfers fame to a product. An explorer transfers proof. Every Goose Person is evidence that the jackets do what the company says in conditions most customers will never face, and the customer does not need to face them to believe it. The ambassadors also define the brand's territory more precisely than any slogan: the North, the high mountains, the polar regions, long distances under hard weather.

Dani Reiss, President and CEO, has a comparison for the position the ambassadors were meant to hold: "We're the Land Rover of clothing."³ A Land Rover is advertised by where it has been driven rather than by who drives it, and the Goose People were chosen on the same principle.

Reiss has also put the logic in negative terms: "There are a lot of brands out there that try to attach a story to their product, but it's not real."³

The roster becomes the campaign

On 10 November 2015 Canada Goose released OUT THERE, a short film directed by the Academy Award winner Paul Haggis and launched globally. Its cast came from the same pool: Laurie Skreslet; Lance Mackey; Karl Bushby, attempting to become the first person to walk around the world in unbroken steps; Paddy Doyle, a veteran pilot at First Air, Canada's northern airline; and Marilyn Hofman, a medevac flight nurse who survived a brush with death in the Canadian Arctic.⁴ Their stories were re-enacted and carried across multiple platforms.⁵

Reiss framed the film in luxury terms: "For us, true luxury means access to new experiences, big ideas, and discovering the unexpected."⁴ That is the point at which the ambassador method met the brand's repositioning. The people stayed real and remained the content. The production values were those of a luxury house. A brand whose most credible marketing had been other people's lives now told those lives itself, with a Hollywood director.

Kevin Spreekmeester, the company's CMO, described the audience the approach was meant to create: "Our consumer likes to feel engaged, they like to feel part of the family".⁵ The name already did that. Goose People turns an ambassador list into a kinship, and a customer in the same parka into a distant member of it.

What the method gives up

The first cost is reach. A musher is famous only among people who follow mushing, a mountaineer among people who follow mountaineering. Neither carries the brand into a new audience the way a film star can, and a brand moving into fashion and global retail eventually needs that reach.

The method also binds the product to biographies. Naming a parka after Skreslet makes a real person part of the product line, which works for as long as that person's story remains the one the brand wants to tell. The Goose People can only lend proof they have actually earned, and the supply of such people is small. That scarcity is what made them credible, and it is also what limits how far the approach can scale.