I clearly remember the exact day in 2001 when I decided that Canada Goose, the small family business I’d recently taken over from my parents, would commit to always making our signature parkas in Canada. I was sitting at my desk, upstairs from our Toronto factory (the only one we had at the time), reading that morning’s newspaper headlines, and I saw that two North American apparel companies were moving their manufacturing abroad. Their leaders gave two reasons: First, the high cost of domestic labor had been squeezing their margins, so it was just good business to pursue higher profits elsewhere. Second, they didn’t believe that customers cared where products were made so long as the brand and the quality remained the same.
A version of this article appeared in the September–October 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review.
