“The number one priority is to give back and to support Canada through this” — Dani Reiss, Presid...

Thanks Goldie. Great to join you and happy to chat about these difficult times.

In my opinion, and I think in many people's opinion, it's the responsibility of business at times like this to step up and to help support society and community and help us all get through this together, because after all, we're all in this together. At Canada Goose we employ approximately 20% of the cut and sew workforce in Canada, so there really is no one better positioned to step in and make personal protective equipment for Canada. It's going well, we ramped up really quickly.

For us, making a garment is making a garment. We have lots of sewing machines, we have capacity, we have pattern makers. Really we had to just figure out the steps we had to take in order to do it, and the big decision was deciding to just do it. That was one of the big first decisions we took, and it was before we knew we would get any support from any level of government — local, provincial, or federal. We just said we're going to make this stuff because personally I knew people, senior levels in hospitals, I spoke to people, I knew what the demand was. Other people in our company knew what the demand was, and we knew this sort of equipment people were really short on. We knew it would be required and we didn't want to wait. Government has to go through its processes to get itself organized, and that's what it needs to do and has been doing. We decided to move ahead on our own to make the product. So we've been manufacturing products since Tuesday and we'll start shipping products out on Monday. The first tranche of goods that we're making, we're actually donating on our own.

Like anybody, none of us know how long this is going to last. Currently I think the speculation is things are locked down for another four weeks, people speculate eight to twelve weeks. We really don't know how long it's going to last. We're prepared to manufacture personal protective equipment for as long as we need to, to support Canada. In fact, we'll be more than happy to export some as well. We feel it's our obligation to do that and that's what business needs to be focused on at this time. We've shifted our focus of our business to doing that. Obviously there are other things business has to do — we have to conserve cash and watch inventory levels and take all the normal responsible business decisions — but for us the number one priority is to give back and to support Canada through this. We think we are uniquely positioned to do that, so we're prepared to do it for as long as we have to. We've been getting great collaboration from the government and commitments from them for goods. We're doing this at materials plus labor, basically, not even including our overheads. It's bigger than all of us, and I think if business responds across the board in this kind of way, I think we stand a much better chance of coming out of this much stronger together.

Yeah, absolutely. It helps because we're able to acquire the raw materials — I mean it's fabric but it's fabric that we don't normally use — we've been able to acquire it quickly and ramp up quickly. Our time to market, as you can see, is extremely fast because of that. We have employees who want to come back to work. Obviously it's their choice in this case. The facilities are not as full as they used to be because of social distancing and all the requirements we have to meet and want to meet. We want to be very careful protecting our employees, obviously as our number one concern. But being able to have eight factories across Canada, we have the capacity to make tens of thousands of units a day if we reach maximum capacity, and we're more than prepared to do that.

We're an international company, so we have employees in Canada — mostly in Canada — and employees in the States, across Europe, Asia, around the world. They're all subject to different rules and regulations and support programs that their governments provide. In Canada, unfortunately we've had to lay off a lot of people in our factories. What we did do is set up an employee support fund. I've contributed my entire base salary to that fund, the company's contributed a bunch of money to it, and many of our amazing employees who are still employed and not laid off have started to contribute their own salaries to this fund as well. It really speaks volumes to the community and the culture of the company. It's amazing that colleagues and peers want to support them through these hard times. We have this fund that we use to support people who aren't getting the kind of support they need from government programs or have extended circumstances. It's been really heartening to see how many of our staff have stepped up and wanted to contribute. It's totally unexpected, and those are the kind of special things that come out of moments like this in history.

Absolutely. And hope is a very important thing.

For sure. We've seen China. It's hard to speculate about the difference between how it played out there and how it'll play out here. Most of our stores are open in China right now. I think China is not normalizing — it's still recovering. It takes a while to recover from something like this, and hopefully there is no reoccurrence of the virus in China. In the best case scenario, if this lasts three months and we could reliably know that, then we could start to slowly ramp back up and get back to business as usual. That would be great. I think it's unfortunate we don't actually know for a fact it will be like that. That's probably the consensus of what's going to happen, but I think it's responsible for business to plan for worse than that, because we don't know what it's going to be like. That's what makes this time so unique — you just don't know how long it's going to last.

I think relative to other countries, we've done a very good job of managing the situation. It's an impossible situation to begin with — we saw this sort of situation coming, it's very difficult to prepare for. I think Canadians are kind people, we're kind to each other. I see lots of great things happening in Canadian business — a lot of leadership, a lot of people stepping up and dedicating their resources genuinely, not because they think it's going to bring them future benefit, but because they feel it's the right thing to do for the country and the people who live in it, because they care. That is a truly Canadian attitude, and it brings me a lot of hope about how we can come out of this. None of us want to be here, but when this ends — and it will — we all want to come out of this as strongly as we possibly can, at the country level, at the business level, at the family level, at every level. The more Canadian businesses I see stepping in to be leaders, I think is great. It's really important to me that as a brand with Canada in its name, and that has been an ambassador for Canada around the world, we take a leadership role in doing this and set a great example for what great community engagement can look like.

Thanks Goldie, always great talking to you. Look forward to seeing you in person again as soon as we possibly can.