The Canadian companies have "aligned visions."
February 7, 2018 by Charlie Eisenhood in News with 0 comments
BE Ultimate and Taiga Ultimate, two Canadian ultimate-focused apparel companies, announced a merger on Tuesday that could shift the dynamics of the market dominated by bigger players like VCS Ultimate1 and Five Ultimate.
In the coming months, the Taiga brand will be subsumed by BE, although many of Taiga’s products will remain available alongside BE’s gear.
The two brands have complementary strengths, says BE founder Rumi Tejpar: Taiga is good at “interacting with customers, generating buzz, and generating solid community with clients,” while BE has a “really strong foothold in performance products.”
BE is looking to overhaul their website and integrate Taiga’s user-friendly tech platform, and the company will look to roll out new marketing campaigns and more community interaction.
“The visions really aligned, in terms of where we saw our companies going,” said Tejpar.
The merged company will maintain a presence in both Eastern and Western Canada. The main headquarters will remain in BE’s office in Vancouver, but employees will also remain stationed in Montreal and Toronto, Taiga’s turf.
Taiga’s apparel is manufactured in Canada; BE does its manufacturing in China. Both facilities will continue operations post-merger, and Taiga will become BE’s ‘Made-in-Canada’ product line. “We were stoked to have a Canadian manufacturing facility,” said Tejpar.
With a bigger team, BE will look to a more robust growth path — and not just in North America. “[We will explore] expansion to new markets like the European markets,” said Taiga Founder and CEO Christian Painchaud. “Doing this only as Taiga would have been very hard to do.”
Painchaud and the other Taiga partners are all now shareholders of BE Ultimate.
For now, both the BE and Taiga websites will remain in operation and accept new orders, but the goal is to integrate into a single web platform by the early summer.
