Naataq Gear puts a spin on Iñupiaq tradition
Naataq Gear, one of Nome’s newest brick-and-mortar shops, only opened its doors this past New Year’s Eve after finding success selling outerwear online. But its story starts back in 2016 when owner Alice Bioff was working as a guide for Nome Discovery Tours. The Crystal Serenity cruise ship visited Nome, and as passengers got off the boat, a tall man with a white cowboy hat on his head and a wife on his arm complimented Bioff’s jacket, a hand-sewn atikłuk, also called a qaspeq or kuspuk.
When he asked if it was waterproof, a lightbulb switched on for Bioff. Maybe she could manufacture traditional garments using modern outerwear fabrics, not just to make sales but to teach the public about her culture.
“I had a vision of educating people,” Bioff told The Nome Nugget last week outside her shop on Front Street where she sells kuspukinspired fleece vests, and waterproof outer-shells and windbreakers, as well as gift items and home goods. She imagined tourists from outside the region wearing her gear and starting conversations with their friends back home. She saw it as “just a natural way to share who we are as Iñupiaq people in this area.”
After the initial idea for the business was sparked, Bioff spent a few years researching the manufacturing industry, working on designs and developing a business plan. She found a cut and sew facility in St. Paul, Minnesota that prototyped her flagship Atmik garment and still manufactures her products today.
In May 2018, Bioff got her business license and started selling her garments online. Sales were so good that Naataq Gear outgrew Bioff’s home office; she found the space on second floor of the building that houses the post office (and formerly the courthouse). She initially intended to use the space for packaging and taking orders and everything else an e-commerce endeavor requires. Most of her sales were coming through social media and she was doing occasional pop-ups to sell garments in town.
“The biggest thing that concerned me was, would it be accepted by our elders and the folks in our region?” Bioff said. She was pleasantly surprised that she got approval from people in the region—and their business, too. Bioff said she has customers across the country, but most of the demand for her products now comes from within Alaska.
“I had my business plan and my market strategy, and the focus was tourism,” Bioff said. “But as I grew and started presenting the product, it changed. It was the locals and the folks from the area and Alaskans that are very intimate with the garment. They understand it, they know the history, and they’ve surpassed my original target market.”
A longer version of Naataq Gear’s origins would start decades earlier. An atikłuk (in Iñupiaq), or a qaspeq (in Yup’ik) is a hooded overshirt with a large front pocket and sometimes a flared bottom. Over the last century, as Western industrial materials flowed in Alaska, atikłuks were often made of fabrics like cloth. But the garment is inspired by traditional Native Alaskan parkas that used an outer layer of animal skin or guts and an inner liner of fur to keep the wearer warm.
Bioff has lived in Nome with her family since 1999 but she grew up in Koyuk and often watched her family members sew their own atikłuks. “It’s in me, it’s instilled in me, it’s part of who I am,” she said. With her store, she hopes to share not only the art of her people, but also their entrepreneurial spirit. That spirit was inspired in her from the time she was young, too. She recalled one of her great uncles running a candy store out of his home and even a makeshift reel-to-reel movie theater.
“I can just smell the woodchips and everything,” Bioff said. “Folks would pay $1 to go into his cabin and watch a movie. I was just in awe about that and what he was doing. And so I think that that is an important role—having a positive impact on the community. Hopefully, [the store] will spark some interest too in our youth, like, hey, we could do this, manufacturing is possible. It kind of opens doors and opportunities, at least in showing that it could happen.”
The pandemic put a dent in her business, Bioff said, and because she’s such a small company, her manufacturing facility put her orders aside when they had to fill government contracts to make masks, “which was understandable.” With COVID funding through the City of Nome, Bioff was able to build up the website and buy a new laptop.
As the summer gets underway, Bioff has her eye on the cruise ship schedule. She recently put up a new large banner outside the building which otherwise might not be so obvious from the street. Bioff said she distributed flyers during the Iditarod, which helped increase foot traffic, and would likely do so again during the summer.
When asked about her plans for new products, Bioff said her daughter likes to make art; with her help, Bioff hopes to be able to stop using stock trims for her gear and instead create something more unique “that represent a little bit more about who we are up here.”
Naataq Gear currently has two other vendors outside of Nome: the Museum of the North in Fairbanks and Mountain View Sports in Anchorage. Bioff hopes to get her wares in front of even more people in the state with a table at the Alaska Federation of Natives Annual Convention later this year.