Forty years ago, Michigan-natives Michael Budman and Don Green founded a shoe company. Algonquin Park’s natural beauty and log cabin aesthetic, where they had summered as youths, was their inspiration. Their signature product was a negative heel shoe called the Sport Root. It sold for $33. Only a couple months after opening their first store on Yonge Street near Rosedale subway station, the owners bought the Boa Shoe Company and opened their own leather factory. Outlets in Montreal, Vancouver, and the U.S. soon followed.

In 1976, the company provided quilted ‘Puff’ boots to Canadian athletes for the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. While not continuous, it was the beginning of a fruitful relationship that would later see Roots dress the underdog Jamaican bobsled team and force a red ‘poor boy’ cap onto the head of a chuckling Prince William. The Olympics would become for Roots what presidential elections are for ‘Saturday Night Live’– a breath of new life and interest every four years into a brand in danger of becoming stale.

Roots expanded their range of products to include bags, belts, and leather jackets and sold them at department stores here (Eaton’s, Holt Renfrew), in the US (Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom), and Europe. International store closings in the early 1980’s led the company to refocus on the Canadian market. It was then they got into t-shirts, sweatpants and athletic gear, founding the Beaver Canoe brand in 1983. The hibernating animal was already the symbol of Camp Tamakwa, where Budman and Green had attended and worked, and eventually the company would manufacture the camp’s official merchandise. Unlike a lot of clothing companies whose ads resemble nonexistent summer camps, an authentic one is key to Roots’ founding legend.

I was never a camp person. The one time I went to overnight camp as a 13-year-old I was terribly homesick and spent much of the time with my nose in Agatha Christie paperbacks. Yet I can appreciate the look of Roots products and how warm and cozy a Beaver Canoe hoodie must feel during a misty morning on the lake. What I can’t relate to is shelling out $68 on sweatpants. I just don’t have that kind of money for sweatpants.

More reasonable is the company’s commitment to leather products. Well-made leather jackets, purses, and other accessories are worth the investment because they should last forever. Every ‘Roots Genuine Leather’ product is made at the Roots leather factory on Caledonia Road. Members of the Kowalewski family, who once ran Boa Shoe Company, continue to work at the factory. One of my girlfriends, who is decidedly not into spending a lot of money for famous brands and designer labels, requested her mom buy her a Roots leather purse as a Christmas present because she knew it was worth it. It’s now her favourite thing she owns.

Almost forgotten now, in 2010 Roots teamed up with author Douglas Coupland in a much-hyped partnership celebrating Canada, not as Group of Seven wilderness, but as a land of technological innovations. The t-shirts featured circuit boards, colour bars, the famous beaver as a neon 3D outline, and Coupland’s swirly signature. As I wrote at the time, “The author, whose Generation X characters dismissed paid-for experiences as inauthentic, has literally turned his name into a brand.”

In recent years, Roots connected with retailers like the American company Target. “Everybody else in the world is coming here,” Green told the Globe and Mail. “So why not Target?” They have also expanded in Asia, which now has over 100 Roots locations. (Canada and the US have 160.) There are 41 outlets in Taiwan alone where, according to the company’s website, “Roots has a near-ubiquitous presence in the country with its distinctive sweatshirts a particularly common sight, worn by Taiwanese of all ages.” The Beaver Cano logo may be Canada’s farthest reaching fashion.

Roots marked their 40^th anniversary with a coffee table book, a full-page ‘thank you’ letter in the Globe, a limited addition motorcycle jacket, and a sale on sweat pants. You can also buy a reissue of the original negative heel shoe for $158.

If the story of Roots (idyllic summer camp memories, multigenerational leather-making family, best pal founders who continue to run the company to this day) seems a bit too good to be true, it’s worth remembering not all their products are made in Canada. In fact, 60% of Roots’ products are made in China, Vietnam, Peru and the United States. Their gradual move towards foreign manufacturing has been met by longtime consumers’ grumbling at a decline in quality. You can’t have it both ways–either an item is well-made and worth the price, or affordable but the consumer buys it knowing she may throw it out in a year. Trying to do both at the same time waters down the brand’s reputation, which at the end of the day is all it has.