The Diffusion of Canada Goose Parkas in the US
It’s that season again. It’s the cold winter season, the snow season, and also the “Canada Goose” season. During this time in the past few years, I remember I could see a person wearing a Canada Goose parka every 10 steps or so in Collegetown or on the street of SoHo in NYC. So how did this brand that nobody in the US had heard of 10 years ago become so popular especially in the cities of Northeast and Midwest? The reason goes back to its history.
Around the year 2000, this Canadian brand started promoting its products to the Europe and Japan markets as high-quality, luxury winter coats after declined by many clothes retailers in the US. The CEO of Canada Goose made this decision because he believed that the consumers in Europe and Japan would have a higher acceptance rate for high-price, good-quality clothes. Indeed, these parkas first became a trend among the fashion elites in Stockholm and later spread across Europe. Hoping to expand the American market too, Canada Goose gave out their parkas in movie sets and film festivals. As some American consumers began to discover the brand’s parkas in the high-end department stores in Europe and spotted them on Hollywood stars, Canada Goose increased its brand awareness significantly in the US in the early 2010s. However, it wasn’t until the parka’s appearance on the cover of the “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue” in 2013 that the brand’s popularity exploded. Since then, Canada Goose has been on a rapid diffusion in the US.
Before 2010s, Canada Goose parkas only achieved a complete cascade in the cluster of some wealthy, cold European cities. People from other regions of the world probably did not have enough acquaintances in those European cities. The portion of “neighbors” or friends a person has wearing the parka need to be higher than or equal to the threshold in order for that person to buy the same parka. In order for more people outside of the original clusters to adopt this coat, there were 2 things Canada Goose needed to do: increase the number of people wearing the parka outside of Europe and improve the quality of the parka. The former directly increased the portion of “neighbors” wearing the brand for people in the US, and the latter made the threshold smaller by increasing the payoff when 2 share-edge people both wear the parka.
With this strategy, the number of Canada Goose consumers in the US increased in an increasing rate, but because the base number was small (only people who had connections to Europeans and movie crews), the raw number of increase was not significant enough to occupy the mainstream market or bypass the tipping point. However, with the higher and higher exposure on magazines, television, and Internet around 2013, suddenly people got introduced to the brand no longer only by seeing people they actually knew in real life. The public personalities became part of the “neighbors” as well, so more and more people outside of the original clusters began to buy Canada Goose. Therefore, not only did a person see more celebrities wore it, but also saw more of their friends wear it. At the same time, the value of each parka increased too. Having celebrities and rich, trend-loving friends wear the parkas, the winter coats became a representative of money and taste. With the proportion of friends owning the parka increased and the threshold to adopt decreased, Canada Goose’s popularity continues to rise.
I personally witnessed its fast spread when I came to the US to attend a high school near NYC in 2014. At that time, there were 100 students in my class, and approximately 50% of them own at least 1 Canada Goose parka. The majority of people who wore a Canada Goose parka in the beginning of high school are local students. Let’s assume there are 50 of them. I knew that 10 people in my class are international students from non-Japan Asian countries, none of whom own a Canada Goose parka at the time. Since we had a small class, I assume everyone know each other in the class. For everyone in my class who did not have a Canada Goose, each one of them had at least 99 friends and 50 parka-owning friends. For local students without a Canada Goose, assume each one of them have 50 friends outside of school, in which about 50% own the parka, so (50+25)/(99+50)=50% of their friends had the parka. For international students, however, their 50 outside-school friends are also non-American who did not own the parka at the time, so each of them has 50/(99+50)=34% of their friends had the parka, and they needed to wait longer for more of their friends to adopt the parka in order to exceed the threshold. Indeed, more local students adopted the Canada Goose fashion earlier than the international students.
Links:
https://www.grailed.com/drycleanonly/canada-goose-history
http://essay.utwente.nl/76218/1/Levchuk_MA_BMS.pdf
https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/9638/volumes/v07/NA-07