Canada Goose dresses the Sundance Film Festival

From the crew to the credits

On 6 December 2012 Canada Goose announced that it would be the Official Outerwear Sponsor of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, held from 17 to 27 January in Park City, Salt Lake City, Sundance and Ogden, Utah. The company outfitted filmmakers and jury members with more than 300 customised Burnett jackets from its Fall/Winter 2012 collection.¹

The release placed the sponsorship at the end of a much longer relationship. Kevin Spreekmeester, Vice President of Global Marketing, said: "From major feature films to independent documentaries, our jackets have played a role in the film community for more than 20 years."¹ It listed productions shot in the cold where the jackets had been used, among them Captain America, National Treasure, The Grey, Mr. Popper's Penguins, Whiteout, Eight Below and Battleship.

A channel the brand did not build

Canada Goose's own history describes the brand as "the (un)official jacket of film crews everywhere" and dates its first appearance on screen to 2004, in The Day After Tomorrow and National Treasure.² Jackie Poriadjian-Asch, later Chief Marketing Officer, explained how the jackets got onto sets in the first place: "The same way [filmmakers] get grips, lighting and all of the elements [to make a movie], they started to look at Canada Goose as one of those elements in that prep stage before they went on location."³

That is an unusual kind of endorsement. The jackets spread through the industry by word of mouth, crew to crew, as kit for working on location in the cold.³ The people recommending them were choosing equipment for a job, standing outside through winter shoots because the schedule said so, and passing on what worked. For an outerwear brand, that is an audience of professional users. It is also an influential one: these are the people who make what everyone else watches, and who are photographed on location when the films are made.

What changed when it became official

The informal arrangement had one weakness. It was nearly invisible to consumers. Crews knew the brand, audiences mostly did not. A festival solves that, because it is the moment when the film industry steps in front of the cameras itself. Sundance brings filmmakers and jurors into the snow of Park City in January, in front of the festival press.¹ Dressing them moved the crew's private credential onto the people the press photographs.

The choice of festival mattered as much as the deal. A paid sponsorship always risks undermining an endorsement whose value lay in being unpaid. Sundance limits that risk because its setting demands the product. A jacket at a Utah festival in January is needed, not merely shown, and the sponsorship reads as the brand doing at scale what crews had already done for themselves.

From sponsor to shop

The relationship grew from there. In January 2016 Canada Goose returned as a Presenting Sponsor, created a special-edition Brookvale jacket for directors and jury members in what it called its fourth year supporting the festival, and opened its first-ever pop-up shop: 1,100 square feet at 577 Main Street in Park City, open from 21 to 31 January, the length of the festival.⁴ Spreekmeester, by then Chief Marketing Officer, said: "Sundance was the perfect backdrop for Canada Goose's first-ever pop-up."⁵

The pop-up closed the loop the sponsorship had opened. In 2013 the festival was a showcase: the brand dressed the industry and let the photographs travel. By 2016 it was also a point of sale, on the same street where the photographs were taken. The distance between the film world's endorsement and a consumer's purchase had shrunk to a few doors.

By 2016 Canada Goose was also in its fifth year as a sponsor of the Toronto International Film Festival, taking the same showcase to its home market.³

What the arrangement asks of the brand

The film industry's endorsement came from use, on location, long before there was a contract, which is precisely why it cannot be bought back in the same form. Every jacket handed out at a festival is a gift that the recipients know is a gift. The brand's answer has been to keep the gifts close to the original use: functional jackets for people working in the cold, at an event held in the cold. As long as the jacket is still the thing a crew would choose without being asked, the sponsorship remains a formal version of an informal truth rather than a substitute for it.