The Best One Yet - Canada Goose’s freezing store — Nintendo’s best week ever — Duolingo hits $1.5B valuation

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

Absurdly expensive coat designer Canada Goose just opened up a store that literally snows inside — “experiential retail” is now “sensational retail.” Nintendo’s Switch console just enjoyed its best week of sales in the US, even though it’s been around for almost 3 years already. And Duolingo became Pittsburgh’s 1st unicorn, hitting a $1.5B valuation as it teaches you French.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. This is snacks. Daily, it is Thursday, December 5th. We're covered in Canada Goose. Oh my God, everything going on. Nintendo. Can you believe this?

And Duolingo. That's why this is the best one. It's so good, Jack. You give me a little more detail on all this. Canada Goose just opened a store in Toronto where it snows in the store. You can try on your urban parka in Arctic condition. This isn't a bad experiential retail. We're calling this sensational retail.

Second story. Nintendo just finished its best week of Nintendo. Nintendo Switch sales, but ever. This Switch, their gaming console, it's like three years old. So we're looking at why a three-year-old gaming console is incredibly popular still. The Egyptians use this thing? I don't know. What's going on?

Third Story, Jack. The unicorn of the day is Duolingo. How do you say that in German? Duolingo. It just became Pittsburgh's first tech unicorn. It's a $1.5 billion company that is helping you pronounce bonjour like bonjour. And it's fascinating the ways that this makes. makes money. I'll give you a hint. You're part of the reason why it makes money. Now, Snackers,

before we jump into all that, we got to talk about happened on yesterday's snacks daily. We were, you might have heard us munching. We had, Jackie, got a little sauce on your cheese. We covered Zoom pizza, which is the robot pizza company. And during the podcast, we actually ordered the robot delivery pizza. Snackers, we may not have made this clear because Jack and I were jumping into the snacks daily material really hard, but we were eating the pizza and enjoying the pizza. I actually had a full slice. Nick actually had a full bite. I'm on a no carbs after 4 p.m. diet, aka the Jack Dorsey special.

So Snackers, we actually recorded on video the Sergeant Pepper's pizza that we got delivered. Right. Which is a pizza with pepperoni, aka a pepperoni pizza with a clever name. So we'll do a quick pizza review. The cheese was stretching. It was stretchy-ish.

Actually, it didn't stretch when you, like, pulled the slice out. Sauce situation? I'm a sauce guy. I'll bathe in the stuff if I got. I prefer the pepperonies. They were huge. They were like the size of a melon. Right.

What kind of pigs did they get these things? And then the box was circular. Okay, that was interesting. Now, we actually documented the whole thing on video. We put it on our Instagram page, which is at Robin Hood Snacks. Now, here's what surprised Jack and I. We were expecting, like we told you on yesterday's snacks, a full Zoom truck to come along with ovens in the truck,

delivering the pizza as they cooked it. The teched-out pizza truck is their differentiated. But you know what happened when we went outside? It was like a Honda Civic. No offense to Honda Civic. I used to drive a Honda Civic. I love a Honda Civic, but I was expecting a robot pizza truck. It was not.

Apparently DoorDash the delivery app did. the delivery for Zoom, which apparently some of them do for Zoom. Zoom pizza, your move. Zoom, we want to see this mobile pizza truck cooking oven thing. And Snackers, follow us at Robin and Snacks to see the video. Let's hit our three stories. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way.

The snacks about to hear ain't food. It's air candy. They don't reflect the views of the Robin Hood family. It's all informational just so. You know, we're not recommending any securities. Nope. It's not a research report or investment advice. Not an offer or sale of a security.

Right. Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robberhood Financial, LLC, member Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, Canada Goose has a new store that doesn't sell things. It freezes you. No, Joe, we're not getting on. Well, it tries to freeze you, but it shouldn't freeze you if Canada Goose does its job right.

Which means we got to talk about Canada Goose here, which began 60 years ago in like a Toronto warehouse selling wool vests. This was a mom and pop company. It eventually got acquired by a private equity firm, and now they sell $1,000 coyote trim jackets that make you feel like an Arctic survivor, even though you're just getting off the four train on the Upper East Side. It's 46 degrees outside. You'd probably be fine in one layer.

Our buddy, Timmy, loves Canada Goose. I think he has one for every day. Yeah, he did buy one once, and then it got stolen from a club the next night of the nightclub. This is an expensive jacket. Timmy, we're sorry. Canada Goose is part of Wall Street now, Not just the people carrying around their jackets on Wall Street.

The jackets are like $1,000. The stock, though, is twice as high as it was when they IPOed in March 2017. How much is it worth, Jack? Canada Goose is worth about one-third of a lift. Now, the winter quarter, like what we're going through right now, that's where Canada Goose makes about half its sales. I'm sorry, nearly half its sales for the entire year. This is pretty critical.

Except for those who, like, plan ahead and buy their winter coats in the spring or in the winter. Now, Snackers. Jack and I wanted to jump in Snacks down on this. and actually visit the store, but it's all the way in Toronto. My passport needs to be re-upped for this one. Now, this is the store that Canada Goose just opened. It's not even really a store. It's called The Journey.

This is an adventure, a wild adventure. It sounds like an Indiana Jones movie. We're going to walk you through this one. Let's start at the CF Sherway Gardens Mall. That's where it is. On a commercial strip in Toronto. If you're on the Gardner Expressway and you pass the Red Lobster on your left, you got too far, turn around. Go back if you want to go to the Journey store.

Now, this journey store by Canada Goose is a multi-sensory experience. So Jack and I are going to speak with you with one sense, your ears. But imagine if you are there. We're going to walk you through this. All right, Snacker. So here, relax. Just let everything be. We're going to take you through this Canada Goose store.

Here we go. So you enter right next to the Red Lobster in the mall. It's called the crevice. That's what the entrance is called. Actually, the crevasse. I was going to say crevasse. Is it like a Quebec thing? It has steep, dark walls.

And you walk through a narrow passage. with a blue icy floor as you walk by like mysterious little caves where there might be wolves or something. They're making Arctic sounds. You're like waiting for a white walker to walk out and like take your arm off. After you get in the store, you're in the elements room. This is kind of the least most interesting room. You check out like nature shows on screen and they just have a bunch of Canada goose coats hanging around. Then you enter the gear room. And this is model to look like that like vault in Norway where they keep all the world seeds in case there's an apocalypse.

and they're all like frozen underground in Norway in this one vault. Norway is like, I haven't seen no one in a while, so we're going to make an arc up here. So apparently Canada Goose is like, you know what? We're going to make one of our rooms look like that. And that's where you go where you actually get your jacket. You get to try on a Canada Goose jacket. Yeah, so you're at the third room in the experience, in the journey, and you're actually

wearing now one of Canada Goose's giant $1,000 jackets. Then you walk into something called the snow room, and this is where things get real. This is the moneymaker here. You're wearing your coat. Thank God. You're wearing this canada goose coat in your cat. They're goodness, Nick, because it's 10 degrees in the snow room. In Fahrenheit, you know what that is in Celsius?

Really cold. All the walls are like plasma screens, which portray this like Antarctic scene. Snackers, it's actually snowing in there. You look on your life. Jack, is that a seal? You think there's a seal. You grab it at the nearest club. Someone's going to end up, like, eating someone next to them because they're

afraid they're going to run out of food. Now, here's the thing. You're staying warm because you're wearing a thousand-dollar Canada Goose Park. And then you walk out and you've just experienced, not just a store, the journey. But before you walk out, you've shared this entire thing with the world on Instagram, which is why Canada Goose loves this. Reminds. Reminds Jack and I have that Batman begin scene.

We're like, he's training with Roger Gould. No, with Liam Gis. He doesn't train with Razagul. Sorry, I forgot. I haven't seen it in a while. Actually, Jackers. I think it is Razagull. I think it is the same guy.

So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over Canada Goose? Experiential stores aren't enough. This store is a theme park. Here's what's wild about this store. It doesn't even have inventory. They don't have the coats at the store. By the time you're done staying warm despite the 10 degree weather, you're so thankful that you're staying warm that you're ready to buy this thing.

So then you walk up to a candidate goose purse and you're like, hey, can I buy one? And if you purchase it by 2 p.m. at the day visiting the store, they will mail it to you like same day. So you get your jacket at home. So this store is so out there. It doesn't even have inventory. We've heard about experiential retail.

Right. Like the Albert store in New York has a hamster wheel. That you can try on the shoes with. Or the Casper store has places you can nap and test out. But this is an experiential retail. Canada Goose is doing something a step up. This is sensational retail that you'll never forget. For our second story, Jack,

watch out for the banana peel over there. Nintendo has been dominating Black Friday sales, and it just hit a key milestone. We're talking about a company that was founded 130 years ago, people. That's the star. That's the star. publicly traded in Japan.

One second, let me reprogram Jack over here. He's got a mushroom situation. Nintendo, based in Kyoto, Japan, as Nick said, 130 years ago. Publicly trade in Japan, but U.S. investors can buy the stock. Yeah, they can. Through an ADR, which is like an American equivalent of a foreign stock. Snackers early snack fact for you here, the guy who developed and created Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda, he was banned from biking to work because he's so important to Nintendo.

They can't risk that guy bumping into a truck and hitting his head. That guy, by the way, that snack fact came from Alex Comsia. We announced it a few weeks ago, but it was worth reiterating. So, Nintendo had its best sales week in the U.S. ever for its Nintendo Switch gaming console. Right. They sold 830,000 units in just seven days in the United States of Switch and the Switch light, which is cheaper, I imagine, and lighter. This is actually the handheld gaming console. It's got the screen between, you know, the remote control.

But that's not all. You can also dock it and play on TV. So it's like part Game Boy for the subway and part PlayStation for your TV. But here's why Jack and I have been following the Switch because it's become a profit puppy for Nintendo like none other. It has sold 17.5 million switches in the U.S. and 41 million gaming consoles worldwide. That's close to Nintendo's personal record, which they set with Super Nintendo. Super Nintendo. They sold 49 million of those. one of them was to the barber household across the street.

I spent hours and hours and hours playing their Super Nintendo. I did my homework, Mom, it's okay. Eating gushers, eating Dunkeroo's, they had the best snacks ever. Snackers, everyone has that one friend whose parents let them have a ridiculous amount of dunkers and snackaroos. And had tons of friends over it because they had Super Nintendo. I meant Dunker's. I don't know what I did there. So Nintendo PS is partnering with Tencent, China's tech company, which means it can finally launch in China too, and that's another opportunity for Switch.

There's a lot of potential customers in China. Now, here is why that news was so shocking to Jack and I. Switch launched two and a half years ago. In video game years, it might as well be 100,000 years old. Yes, video games are not like fine wines. They tend to lose popularity as they get older. No joke, I think you could see some of these things in like the hieroglyphics in Egypt on the pyramids they're so ancient.

So, Nick, this means that Nintendo Switch last week. week sold more than its launch week two and a half years ago that's insane it makes no sense and this leads to our takeaway so jack what is the takeaway for our buddies over at nintendo this christmas is easy for nintendo next christmas in 2020 is going to be super hard like game over situation video gaming is a threoply right now you got three huge players monopolizing the market you got xbox playstation and nintendo nintendo switch it's old 2017's when it launched the competition The competition, though, is ancient. Okay, PlayStation 4, which is the latest PlayStation.

It debuted in 2013. And the next model, the PlayStation 5, it won't be ready until next holiday season. Another rival, Xbox 1, also debuted way back in 2013. And the new one, not named yet, also going to be ready, holiday 2020 next year. So if you want to buy a gaming device, you can buy an ancient PlayStation 4, an ancient Xbox 1. What are you doing? Or a pretty old Nintendo Switch. That's actually pretty cool.

So this year, Nintendo's getting all the love. Next year, Xbox and PlayStation are brawling for the top spot with their new consoles. For la Nostra terso story. I think that means no Parmesan cheese, please. For the third story, we're talking about Duolingo, please. So Nick's speaking Italian? He nailed them with the Parmesan. Duolingo is a $1.5 billion unicorn, and it's officially the most downloaded education app on Earth.

This is a translation app you use if you're trying to learn a language, or as they put it at Duolingo so elegantly. Learn German in five minutes a day for free. This company, it's an app. It's got 30 million monthly active users. And it's based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wonderful town. The Three Rivers City?

Beautiful city. A lot of sports teams. Everything's yellow and gold. Sorry, everything's yellow and black. Fun fact, the Pittsburgh Steelers logo is the logo for steel. It seems like a conflict of interest. It's pretty cool. It's actually awesome.

So it just got an investment from Google's venture capital arm. If you're getting invested in by Google, Google, you're doing something, right? We say that all the time. Now, they've got 30 languages that they offer you to, like, teach you every day through the app. Yeah, it's not just German that sales pitch that again. You got Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Hawaiian, Navajo.

30 languages total, but they got a lot to go because there are actually 6,500 languages that humans speak on planet Earth. Although 2,000 of them are only spoken by less than one. thousand people. Some engineer over duolingo is just like, wait a second. We have how many more to do? This wasn't on the year-end review. All right, so a lot of Americans learn German by watching American movies in high school German

class with German subtitles. That's how you do it back in the day. Nick actually is learning Italian well, I've been continuing my Italian education. Now, if you open the Duolingo app, so I open this every day, there's like an awkward owl theme to it. I don't know what's like their bird of choice. It's their spirit animal. Yeah, you're looking here, you're like, oh, I devo empare, on you journo. Why is there an owl crossing the

screen. So what are these crowns? So you end up winning crowns. I'm like, it's a weird scenario. I've got like a bronze star in this. And subjunctives, I've got like three crowns. When it comes to like infinitives, you know, I'm doing something with like langots, which is their virtual currency.

What are the virtual currency for? You can like use the virtual currency to buy new classes. Like if you want to learn, I don't know, like Italian, everyone wants to know curse words. I don't think Durulingo is going to be pleased when they listen to the pod and they hear that sounds. Well, I got to tell you. It's been really fascinating because I have been using this every day. and it keeps you up to date with your language.

No, Nick loves it. Nick loves it. And we found incredibly fascinating one way that it makes money. It's killing two birds, maybe even three birds. That's what we think. With one stone. This is wild snackers. You end up learning a new language while translating the internet, and you didn't even know it.

When you're doing those lessons Nick described, you're doing those lessons as work for a company. All right, so here's how it goes down. Let's say your BuzzFeed, the media company, the news, company. Which is an actual client of Duolingo. And you've got an article on like famous dog walkers. And you want to translate this into Arabic for like an Arabic article. Right. So BuzzFeed dot Arabic. Okay. Now let's say another person is trying to learn Arabic so they open their Duolingo app and they're like, hey, I'm going to do a lesson on Duolingo. Yeah, you want to study abroad in Cairo. You want to speak the language. So you open the app, you start playing around with it and a puzzle comes up to teach you Arabic. And that puzzle has a few words in it. Dog, pet, exercise, money. Perhaps.

Making you connect them with the Arabic words so that you learn what the Arabic words are. Okay, if you successfully translate those four words, dog pet, exercise money, Duolingo is like, congratulations, you passed. But guess what? Yeah. You also just translated part of that BuzzFeed article, which BuzzFeed needs translated into Arabic. And since so many people are trying to learn Arabic and using the same Duolingo app and facing the same puzzle, all of your answers are crowdsourced to give the correct translation to BuzzFeed.

So Duolingo gets paid by BuzzFeed for translating an article. You are doing the actual translating along with millions of other Duolingo users, and BuzzFeed gets its article translated with high confidence because so many people did the translation. It's a win, win, win in 30 different languages. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over Duolingo? Now that it's got this big VC money, one revenue source, the one we just described, that's not enough. No, no, VCs are going to expect to have a bunch more revenue sources and put pressure on you for it And guess what?

Duolingo started doing that in some more interesting ways. Yeah, it actually advertises for like travel services, because if you're learning a language, you're probably going to travel. Or if you don't want to see the ads, you end up paying for a subscription, but that's $9.99 a month going straight to Duolingo. And then if you're learning German on Duolingo, they'll offer you events like a Caféstunda in New York City. That's not the actual name, but Jack thinks that should be the name.

It's a great name. Or a Schnitzelstunda or maybe even a beerstomda. You put that as a tattoo, like right on the bicep there as you're learning. So you can meet up with other people learning the same language so that you can practice more. They even came out with like a $49 English proficiency test for international students and that test is accepted at like 400 schools worldwide.

Not too shabby duolinga. Fascinating way it makes money. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for the best pod we've ever done? Canada Goose is going to save you from Frostbite so that you buy their parka. The sensational is the new experiential. Nintendo is getting all the presents this holiday season.

The Switch is living its best life for one more year until PlayStation. Xbox upgrade themselves to come along. Duo Lingo is now worth $1.5 billion for making it easy to learn another language. And making it easy to make money through translation services in a really cool way. Now Snackers, time for

a snack fact of the day. This one sent in by Marianne, who's from New York City, but by way of Worcester, interesting. Welcome to Worcester, dollar 25. She's got a very straightforward snack fact for us. It requires 8,000 gallons of water to grow

one pound of almonds. Breakfast. So when you're drinking that almond milk, which I do, I'm going to feel a little guilty now because there may be less environmentally impactful ways to compliment my cereal. Basically drank an entire lake right there. Yeah, that's a lot of water. Almonds are a very water-intensive crop. Snackers love to having you with us for this wonderful Thursday. Remember, follow us at Robin Hood Snacks on Instagram.

We're eating a lot of pizza. Zoom pizza. The Robin Hood Snacks podcast you just heard reflects the opinions of only the hosts who are associated persons. of Robin Hood Financial LLC and does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. The podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to serve as a recommendation to buy or sell any security and is not an offer or sale of a security. The podcast is also not a research report and is not intended to serve as the basis of any

investment decision. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.