BCBUSINESS.CA
How does a B.C. company not only
exist but thrive when so many others
are closing shop? Aritzia, which started
as a section of Hill's department store
in Kerrisdale and became its own entity
in 1984, made its rst appearance on
the BCBusiness Top 100 list this year, at
No. 74. Unlike Lululemon Athletica Inc.,
widely acknowledged as the inventor of
a category now known as athleisure,
Aritzia is a smart revisioner: its in-house
designers pick up on runway trends
and build branded collections around
certain motifs.
"One of our biggest advantages is
that we are able to move with fashion,
and we're not known for one look,"
founder and
CEO Brian Hill told inves-
tors in an earnings call in May, discuss-
ing a new label that features romantic
styles with embellishments and satu-
rated colours. (Hill, who tends to avoid
media, declined to provide a comment
for this story.) "We didn't think we had
a line with that kind of ethos, so we cre-
ated Little Moon… If Little Moon for
whatever reason doesn't become mean-
ingful, then we just shrug our shoulders
and move on to the next line, and that's
the beauty of our model."
Aritzia, which has about 60 stores
in Canada, 19 in the U.S. and between
4,000 and 4,500 employees, certainly
resonates with its target market of
millennials, who šock to its locations,
stand in blocks-long lineups for its
warehouse sales and increasingly stock
up online. At a middle-tier price point,
it makes luxurious gestures; actor and
Prince Harry šame Meghan Markle was
recently Instagrammed wearing a white
Aritzia blazer at a polo match.
The company capitalized on its years
of strong growth with an initial public
ožering last October, and then took the
usual bumps and bruises of the equity
markets. Its shares were snapped up
quickly at a high of $19, but following the
January sale of more stock to the pub-
lic by a group of early investors, prices
dropped to about $14 at the end of May.
Financial results for the 2017 scal
year ending on February 26 were fairly
glowing, including annual net revenue
of $667.2 million, a 23 per cent increase
over the previous year. In the May
earnings call, Hill also noted double-
digit comparable sales growth—a key
measure of retail performance that
