Roots CEO Meghan Roach is swinging for the growth fences as she rises to prominence in the World Series

They are also closely linked to the outdoors.

“How you describe a Canadian,” says Roach, “is probably very similar to how you describe Roots.”

Roach says she was tapped for the top job in 2020 because of her international perspective and focus on long-term investing, both of which she developed at a young age.

The Pembroke native was first introduced to the capital markets by her grandfather, a Bell employee, who took advantage of the company’s equity program to gift shares to his grandchildren.

Roach also attended boarding school with classmates from all over the world and, after earning a business degree from Queen’s University, moved to Britain where she obtained an MBA from Oxford.

After graduating from business school, Roach worked for Searchlight Capital Partners, the private investment firm that bought a majority stake in Roots in 2015 and was appointed in 2020 as a board member, then interim CFO and then CEO.

After a few years focused on stabilizing the struggling business and overcoming the pandemic, Roach says Roots is now focused on growth both at home and abroad, including expanding from cozy winter clothing to all-season apparel.

Founded in Toronto in 1973 by Michael Budman and Don Green, Roots now employs 2,000 employees year-round, and up to 2,500 during the busier fall and winter seasons. The company currently has 221 retail locations, including two in the US, 109 in Taiwan and 110 in Canada, and ships to 75 countries.

My grandfather left his family farm to work for Bell Canada when he was 15. His job was to take this big metal pole with handles and knock out chunks of ground so they could put telephone poles in it.

It was a difficult job and they didn’t expect him to last long, but he ended up spending his career working there.

One thing he learned about early on was the employee stock program. When we were kids, he gifted us stock and then made us books recording when he bought it, the dividend, and the adjusted expenses.

That interested me in the idea that there are two ways to make money; work and invest.

Meanwhile, my father had a dental practice, where I learned a lot about entrepreneurship, and my mother, a retired nurse, managed his books, which introduced me to accounting.

I studied commerce because it allows you to look at the business from all angles, not just economics, but also statistics, marketing and technology.

I studied German, Spanish and French, and that globalization piece was also interesting because I went to a very international boarding school with classmates from all over the world.

I originally thought about going into investing or consulting, but I started my bachelor’s degree right after the dotcom crash.

At that time, investment and consulting jobs were hard to find, so there was a stability factor in accounting. I also really enjoyed understanding the finances of companies.

In my third year I interned at KPMG and then returned full-time after graduating while getting my accounting title. I actually have mine community designation two years ago.

I feel like my career has been shaped by economic crises.

I left KPMG and joined the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan just as Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008.

There were significant job losses across the board, but the financial sector was particularly hard hit, and from a private equity perspective, many portfolio companies were also affected.

After I left Teachers, I was in Europe during the sovereign debt crisis – first doing an MBA at Oxford and then working for a private investment firm called Searchlight Capital Partners – so those things shaped my career and shaped the way I look at investing and risk.

I joke that I’m a wartime CEO.

At Searchlight I invested in heritage brands; the first portfolio company I worked on was M&M Food Market, before they acquired Roots on the day my first daughter was born in 2015.

I was placed on the board of directors to help Roots’ founders transition to a professional management team until it went public in 2017. When the company faced challenges in 2019, the CFO left, and since I had an accounting background and knew the company, I was asked to come in as interim CFO.

In January 2020, the board decided they wanted to make a change and started recruiting a new CEO, and I stepped in as interim CEO. I was part of the team looking at candidates, but then they asked me to make it permanent in May.

I had spent my entire career in private equity and there was a lot to solve at Roots, but the board and founders had confidence in me, which meant a lot.

As soon as I started our distribution center in Wuhan, we saw something happening in Asia and knew it would have a big impact.

Working in private equity really requires you to think long term, and I knew that no matter how bad things got, we would eventually get back to normal, and that’s how I approached the pandemic.

We focused on health and safety, finance and operations, and then built teams to lead each. At that moment, dealing with the crisis felt comfortable.

Growth, across multiple facets.

When I came in, I restructured some aspects of the business and closed a few stores in the US and China with the prospect of future returns as we focus on reaching customers digitally.

Our largest business is in Canada, but I think there are more opportunities to think globally. It was a challenge; first because of the pandemic, which lasted much longer in China, and now because of the situation in the United States. We invest in things like consistency, branding, marketing and preparing the company to become more global.

In terms of products, we have made some significant changes, and today 95 percent are made from sustainable materials, which has been a big area of ​​focus. We also want to expand certain product lines, such as our ‘Active’ line or our water-resistant ‘Roam’ line, investing in more technical features to make items more suitable for outdoor activities.

We are also continuing to focus on our sweat collections, which have always been a big part of our business, investing in new logos, developing softer plush fleece for our ‘Cloud Collection’ and evolving that category to be more fashionable.

We’re also driving growth by investing in branding and marketing, not just in terms of advertising, but also in how we show up at things like store openings, renovations or events, like with our recent Seth Rogen campaign, where we invested in a major celebrity partner for the holiday season.

Canadians know us – 95 percent say they know Roots – but if you haven’t been there in a while, you might be surprised. We’ve changed a lot from the sweat brand from your childhood.

At some point we also outfitted the UK team, US and Barbados, which goes back to the founder’s global mindset.

I never say never. We are incredibly proud of our athletes, we are very proud to have been an Olympic sponsor, and if there is an opportunity for us to get involved again we would be open to it. We’re also proud of HBC and Lululemon, who stepped up after us.

In the meantime, our Canada Collection, which we have always had, continues to sell well, especially around times like the Olympic Games and Canada Day.

There is clearly a strong association.

The founders came up with the brand at a summer camp in Algonquin Park and they had something called the “Algonquin Test” where they picked up a piece of clothing and said, “Could you wear this in Algonquin Park?” and if the answer was ‘no’, they wouldn’t make it.

People associate Canada with the outdoors, and that gives authenticity to the brand as we’ve taken it from Algonquin Park to the rest of Canada and now to the world.

I’ve been CEO of Roots for six years and now if you Google my name, that’s all it comes up.

I haven’t had time to think about it yet, so right now it’s in a ziplock bag in a safe, but I hope at some point it can be authenticated and put on display.