The business world mostly remembers the early 1990s as a difficult time due to a significant recession in North America that lasted for more than two years, but the sporting goods industry in Canada was a sector of the economy that surprisingly thrived during that time.

One good example was Canstar Sports, one of the predecessor companies of Roustan Sports Ltd. Canstar could seemingly do no wrong under the direction of its new president and chief executive officer, Gerald Wasserman.

Wasserman, a Montreal native and a former goalie who had played for McGill University and practised with the Montreal Canadiens before becoming a corporate force as a noted fix-it man, had stepped in to reorganize what had been a failing company called Warrington Products. He renamed the business and expanded it by buying Cooper Canada’s hockey assets, and then he positioned Canstar Sports as a major force in the new inline skate phenomenon.

Within a short time, Wasserman had brought Canstar back from the brink and had made it the top sporting goods manufacturer in the country.

“Turnaround is a funny word,” he said in 1993. “Resurrection is a better one.” (1)

Hockey's Oldest Business – Since 1847: Chapter 9 – Canstar Sports 1 As a practice goalie with the <a href="https://thehockeynews.com/nhl/montreal-canadiens">Montreal Canadiens</a> in the late 1950s, Gerald Wasserman put his life on the line every time he saw Bernie 'Boom Boom' Geoffrion coming down the wing and winding up for a slap shot.

Wasserman had by then relinquished his dual roles, stepping down from the presidency in June 1992. He was replaced as president by Donald MacMartin, a former distillery executive, but he remained influential with Canstar Sports for some time as vice-chairman. (2) Canstar continued to follow Wasserman’s lead by looking for sensible growth opportunities, and one it found was Daoust skates. Canstar already controlled half the world’s export market in skates with its existing brands – Bauer, Lange, Micron and Mega – but it bought Daoust in 1992 for $2.8 million and successfully incorporated it into the product line. (3)

Skate production was centralized in two locations. Molded ice skates and inline skates were made in Saint-Jerome, Quebec, northwest of Montreal, and stitched skates were made in a former shoe factory in the Galt area of Cambridge, Ontario; Wayne Gretzky, Paul Coffey, Denis Savard, and Eric Lindros were among the many NHL superstars who were wearing a Canstar brand after the Daoust purchase.

Hockey stick manufacturing, of course, continued a short drive away from Galt in Canstar’s historic plant in nearby Hespeler, and it was thriving as well.

“Recession or no recession, the company has emerged as the world’s premier source for ice and street hockey gear,” a Kitchener-Waterloo Record reporter wrote in April 1993. “We’re seeing tremendous growth,” MacMartin said in the article, which noted that sales had “rocketed 67 per cent” in the past five years, with room for still more growth. (4)

MacMartin was even more effusive in an article that appeared less than a month later in the Montreal Gazette. That article said Canstar Sports did nearly $40 million in sales for the first quarter of 1993, up 19 percent over the previous year, and it was expected that annual sales would surpass $200 million, compared to $177 million in 1992. “Sales in the U.S. continue to exceed expectations,” MacMartin said. “The potential market is phenomenal.” (5)

The $200-million-plus target was indeed met, and near the end of 1994, it was reported that Canstar was on track for another record-setting year, with anticipated sales of $284 million. (6) The company was expanding again with the construction of a new skate factory in Czechia, modelled after the plant in Galt; Canstar already held a 15-percent share of the hockey market in Europe, and the new facility was intended to help the company grab an even bigger share without affecting its existing export business. (7)

As important as the Cooper Canada purchase had been, Canstar’s crown jewel was undoubtedly Bauer, and this became even clearer when the hockey stick factory in Hespeler began producing Bauer-branded sticks in addition to its Cooper models.

Larry Koabel, who had left the factory to join Canstar’s office in Mississauga as a product manager, said in an interview that he played an active role in this development. Cooper sticks were better regarded than they had been in the early days after Cooper Canada bought the factory from Canada Barrels and Kegs in 1972, but they were still seen as a budget brand. Koabel wanted to change that.

“I pushed to get the Bauer name on sticks,” he said. “The Cooper name was looked at as a low-end product. They didn’t have exposure at the NHL level.”

Gerry Wasserman was still running Canstar at the time, and he was supportive of Koabel’s plan.

“He went to the factory and sat down with (plant manager) Ross Huehn,” Koabel said. “They managed to put together a high-end Bauer stick line on the manufacturing side. I was involved in what we wanted and what would sell, and then we went after the NHL exposure.

“Bauer is a force to be reckoned with in the marketplace because we always knew our products, and (in Hespeler) we knew more about hockey sticks than anybody in the world. But we’d had a reputation of being a low-end product, and we got rid of that.”

It didn’t happen immediately. The factory continued to produce Cooper sticks for a particular market while working to create three versions of the new Bauer Supreme stick: the 3003, which was intended for minor and junior hockey players; the 3006, which some pros used; and the 3030, which Koabel called “the finesse product” for NHL players. Economical variations of each version were also offered for sale to the public.

“There were five or six different shafts that could be used in the NHL models that were never retailed,” Koabel said, noting that the Supreme’s model names, or numbers, were taken from rifle cartridges and were intended to reflect the fact that these sticks were meant to shoot – the puck, that is. “So, we really gave pros custom products. They carried retail branding on them, but they were custom products... If you give a professional hockey player something that he really believes is his own, he's really going to believe in it. He was involved in designing it, and he was involved in building it, and this is only his hockey stick and nobody else has got one. You're treating him like he's part of the family.”

Koabel credits Canstar Sports with having instinctively known what Cooper Canada had needed a few years to learn – to simply stand back and let the hockey stick manufacturer do what it did best.

“They left us alone, between Ross Huehn and the factory and myself, to design and build products that were as good as, if not better than what our competitors had,” Koabel said. “We built a hockey stick that had a better blade on it than a Sherwood stick, and we built a hockey stick that had a better shaft in it than a Koho or a Titan or a Canadien.

“It was a blend of both, and we still had to hit the price points. We weren't in a position to dictate pricing yet. We did later on, once we got strong enough that we could open new price points at the top. But in the beginning, that was the thinking, and what really sold the whole thing was the NHL exposure. Once we had two players on every NHL club that existed at the time, then I promoted that at the (trade) shows, and everybody was surprised that we were there.”

They probably shouldn’t have been surprised, because Bauer had been a major player in the hockey market since long before its name started being applied to sticks.

Coincidentally, Bauer, like the stick factory, was based in Waterloo Region and had deep roots there. It began with a shoemaker named Roy Charles Bauer, who was born in November 1895 near Elmwood, in Bentinck Township in Grey County. (Contrary to a bizarre company history published in Bauer’s 2017 product catalog, marking what the company wrongly identified as its 90th anniversary, the family name was not originally Freibauer.) (8)

The Bauer family settled in Berlin (now Kitchener) by 1911, and 15-year-old Roy Bauer was listed in that year’s Canadian Census as a machine operator at an unidentified shoe factory. He later worked in the office of the Canadian Consolidated Felt Company before and after military service during the First World War before venturing out on his own with the Bauer Shoe Company in 1922. (9)

Three years later, Bauer absorbed one of his local competitors, the Western Shoe Company, which had begun operations in 1906 and built a factory on Victoria Street North the following year. (10) Bauer continued to operate under the Western Shoe banner at its location, likely because it was better established in the marketplace. The plant’s presence along the Canadian National Railways main line through Kitchener certainly wouldn’t have hurt his business prospects.

Like many ancestors in the Roustan Sports Ltd. family tree, Bauer was an inventor as well as a craftsman.

In 1930, he earned some notoriety after designing and building his own “luxurious camp caravan,” a large and elaborate RV that served as a mobile “miniature household” for Bauer, his wife, their five children, his father and the family dog as they embarked on a vacation across Canada and the United States that lasted several months. (11)

His imagination and his ingeniousness came to the fore again later that same year and, combined with a bit of family frustration, led to Bauer revolutionizing the manufacturing of skates.

At that time, skate buyers had to purchase a “skating outfit” of boots and blades separately, then have them attached together – sometimes, but not always at the same store. Bauer said in an interview in 1956 that his wife had gone shopping one day to buy skates for their son, Gerald, “and came home complaining about the inconvenience she had suffered from having to trot all over town.”

Bauer then wondered if it would be possible to build skates at Western Shoe as one pre-assembled unit. When he realized that it was, he suddenly found himself with an entirely new sideline. (12)

The Bauers’ other son, Donald, wrote in an internally published company history in the mid-1970s that the first step in the process had been to buy blades from a major producer of that item, the Starr Manufacturing Company of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Once Roy Bauer determined that his idea would work, he bought a two-year supply of blades from Starr, and he also began planning to be able to manufacture his own blades when that supply ran out. (13)

By the end of 1931, “the famous Bauer hockey outfits” were being marketed across Canada, indicating immediate and wide customer acceptance of the idea. “Bauer Hockey Boots With Excellent Tube Skates Securely Riveted On. Complete,” read one newspaper advertisement of the time, emphasizing the novelty of being able to buy a skating outfit in this way. (14)

According to Don Bauer’s company history, his father’s plan to produce his own blades came to fruition by 1933, and by then, he had become aware that there would be a significant cost of production that could only be justified with a high volume of output. Bauer accomplished this by arranging to supply blades to other shoe factories in Canada and the U.S. (15)

In May 1934, the Canada Skate Manufacturing Company was incorporated with a capitalization of $80,000, and later that year, Bauer moved the operation into a new factory next door to Western Shoe in Kitchener. (16)

A fire gutted the establishment soon after it opened – a misfortune experienced by most of Roustan Sports' corporate forefathers – but production resumed immediately, and Bauer took the opportunity to expand the plant as it was rebuilt. (17) This expansion was necessary because his new firm was already beginning to dominate the Canadian export market for skates; the Kitchener Daily Record reported in October 1936 that Canada Skate had produced 80 percent of all skates that had been shipped to the United States in the first nine months of that year. (18)

Roy Bauer developed his local market by becoming involved in hockey in Kitchener, where he eventually operated the city’s Jr. B franchise during the 1940s. Hockey also brought a deep personal connection when his daughter Marguerite married Boston Bruins star Bobby Bauer, a Waterloo native. (19)

Bobby not only became Canada Skate’s first NHL endorser – the company’s Bobby Bauer Special model was a popular line for many years starting in the late 1940s – his help in developing that skate paved the way for him to join the company after he retired from the NHL. (20) As a production manager, Bobby worked alongside his brothers-in-law, Gerry, who was the plant manager, and Don, who was head of sales and marketing.

Along with Western Shoe and Canada Skate, Roy Bauer set up the Bauer Shoe Company as a Canadian distributor and Bauer Canadian Skates Inc. as a United States distributor, with a warehouse in Tonawanda, New York. Canada Skate was producing figure and speed skates along with skates for hockey, and by 1964, it employed 360 people. Don Bauer, who also held the title of secretary-treasurer with Canada Skate, said efforts were being made to increase exports not only to the U.S. but also to Europe with the help of a representative who was based in London. Reportedly, American speed skater Terry McDermott was wearing Bauer skates during his gold medal-winning race at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. (21)

The Bauer empire went through some major changes in the 1960s and 1970s. Most significantly, Roy Bauer sold it all to Greb Shoes Limited, also of Kitchener, in 1965. (22)

Bauer was operated by Greb as a separate division after the sale, and it was under the direction of Gerry and Don Bauer that a new flagship model, the Bauer Supreme, was developed and successfully introduced in 1966. Don was a high-level hockey player in his own right – he played for two Allan Cup championship teams in Kitchener in 1953 and 1955 – who began to promote Bauer skates at the NHL level and managed to sign superstar celebrity endorsers like Bobby Hull and Bobby Orr. In 1970, he facilitated an agreement with the NHL that saw Bauer adopted as the league’s official skate. (23) Gerry left the company in 1969, but Don remained until 1979. Roy Bauer retired after selling his companies and died on May 13, 1989, at age 93. (24)

Greb was itself purchased by Warrington Products in 1974. (25) The Bauer division remained at the forefront of skate development by helping to introduce the Tuuk blade in 1976, a revolutionary design that was quickly adopted by the Canadiens and then other NHL teams, sounding the death knell for traditional tube skates. (Trivia: Habs forward Jimmy Roberts was the first NHL player to wear and use Tuuk blades in a game.) (26) This continuing commitment to innovation allowed Bauer to maintain its position as Warrington’s top hockey brand as Lange and Micron later joined the fold, and so it made sense to keep promoting it as Warrington gave way to Canstar Sports.

Canstar’s takeover of Cooper Canada’s hockey assets coincided with a decision to close Bauer’s aging Kitchener plant and move its skate production into a newer and larger space. It found a defunct shoe factory on Dobbie Drive in the Galt section of Cambridge and later moved some of its protective equipment manufacturing there as well. (27) This meant that, along with the old hockey stick factory in Hespeler, Cambridge was at the heart of Canada’s sporting goods industry in the early and mid-1990s.

Despite the age of the stick factory, it was producing more and better sticks than ever before for some of the best hockey players on the planet. It was also producing high-end Cooper baseball bats that were very well-regarded and were being used by more than 200 players from all 26 (at the time) MLB teams, including the world-champion Toronto Blue Jays; Canstar had not purchased the bat operation from Cooper, but it did continue making the bats under contract with Irwin Toys. (28)

Canstar’s skilled workers in Hespeler were led by managers who knew the business, and they were supported by executives who recognized that those workers and managers had a solid handle – pun intended – on what they were doing. Together, they had all given the factory a new and well-deserved reputation for excellence.

“There was nothing to be ashamed of, working for Canstar Sports,” Koabel said. “We were hockey to the world. That’s what I always said – and that actually appeared on the cover of one of the catalogs one year.”

“We’re the dominant player in the hockey business in the world by far,” company president and CEO Gerry Wasserman concurred in a February 1992 interview.

But nothing stays the same in the business world, a reality Roustan Sports Ltd. continues to face today. Trends were changing in the sporting goods industry, and Canstar Sports, through its success, had painted a bullseye on its back.

As big as it was in its field, even bigger fish were circling, and one such fish was Nike. After Wasserman stepped aside, the stage was set for a transaction that would eventually change everything for Bauer employees across Canada – and especially in Cambridge.

Jonathon Jackson is a hockey historian based in Guelph, Ontario.

Follow along as we post new chapters of Hockey's Oldest Business – Since 1847 on TheHockeyNews.com.

Read the previous chapter:  Chapter 9 – Canstar Sports 1

Read the next chapter: Chapter 11 – Nike Bauer

(1) John Greenwood, “He Shoots He Scores,” Financial Post Magazine, June 30, 1993.

(2) “MacMartin goes to Canstar,” Montreal Gazette, May 2, 1992.

(3) Tom Nunn, “Canstar signs deal for Daoust skates,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, November 7, 1992.

(4) Tom Nunn, “Canstar dekes the recession,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, April 24, 1993.

(5) Mary Lamey, “Canstar Sports shoots for $200 million in sales,” Montreal Gazette, May 19, 1993.

(6) Tom Nunn, “Nike to buy top area sports gear company,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, December 15, 1994.

(7) Mary Lamey, “Canstar Sports shoots for $200 million.”

(8) Bauer 2017 Catalog. Canadian census records dating back to 1851, which was around the time of the family’s immigration to Canada from what is now Germany, establish that the family name has always been Bauer.

(9) “Footwear Findings,” Footwear in Canada, January 1923; Sandy Baird, “Early Manufacturer Sold Shoes at $1.85,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, June 22, 1954.

(10) “Bought a Site,” Berlin Daily Telegraph, August 29, 1906; “Started Work To-Day,” Berlin News-Record, March 18, 1907; “Bauer Shoe Co. Purchases Western Shoe Co. Plant,” Kitchener Daily Record, August 5, 1925.

(11) “Local Folk Travel To Far Places In Splendid Caravan,” Kitchener Daily Record, June 28, 1930.

(12) Lloyd Johnston, “K-Ws Use City-Made Equipment,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, January 14, 1956.

(13) Don Bauer, “Bauer History,” circa 1975.

(14) Glasgow Shoe Parlor advertisement, Niagara Falls Evening Review, November 25, 1931; R.H. Williams and Sons, Limited – The Glasgow House advertisement, Regina Leader-Post, December 3, 1931.

(15) Don Bauer, “Bauer History.”

(16) “Ottawa Incorporations,” Montreal Gazette, May 19, 1934; “Skate Factory In Operation In Kitchener,” Kitchener Daily Record, August 3, 1934.

(17)  “Canada Skate Co. Gutted By Fire; Loss Is $20,000,” Kitchener Daily Record, March 19, 1935; “Skate Firm Loss May Be $40,000,” Kitchener Daily Record, March 21, 1935; “Building Shows Heartening Sign,” Kitchener Daily Record, May 10, 1935.

(18) “Kitchener Firm Gets Big Share,” Kitchener Daily Record, October 28, 1936.

(19) Despite their shared surname, Marguerite Bauer and Bobby Bauer were not related prior to their marriage in November 1941. Their respective ancestors had come to the Kitchener-Waterloo area from entirely different parts of what is now Germany. Their connection did make for some confusion given that both had brothers with similar names; Marguerite’s brother Gerald was known as Gerry Bauer, and Bobby’s brother Jerome was known as Jerry Bauer.

(20) Eaton’s advertisement, Toronto Daily Star, November 25, 1948; Jim Crerar, “Bobby Bauer Is Undecided On Dutchman Coaching Job,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, January 6, 1960.

(21) William E. Jeffery, “Olympic gold medal this year won by Canadian-made skates,” Financial Post, February 29, 1964.

(22) “Greb Shoe Firm Purchases 4 Bauer-Owned Companies,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, October 30, 1965.

(23) “Four NHL clubs in avant garde,” Montreal Gazette, September 30, 1970.

(24) “Roy C. Bauer founded skate, shoe companies,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, May 15, 1989.

(25) Henry Koch, “3 retire, new president named in Greb shuffle,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, October 18, 1974.

(26) Richard Proctor, “New stainless steel skate blades winning hockey converts,” The Globe and Mail, December 31, 1977; “Tuuk blades – hockey’s new craze,” Sault Star, January 18, 1978.

(27) “Bauer skate plant moves to Cambridge,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, September 26, 1989; “Cooper’s hockey assets completely bought out by Canstar Sports Inc.,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, December 2, 1989; “Plant expansion to create 130 jobs,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, May 24, 1990; Tom Nunn, “Canstar dekes the recession.”

(28) John Kernaghan, “Cambridge bats are all the rage with big leaguers,” Hamilton Spectator, June 14, 1991; Tony Reinhart, “Area firm goes to bat for Jays,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, October 22, 1992.