FUR FIGHT Dwindling industry laments competing trade shows
IT’S NOT AN EASY WAY TO MAKE A LIVING as animal rights campaigns have reduced demand and prices for fur
“United we stand, divided we fall,’’ said Zuki, a colourful character who is known for his equally colourful sheared beaver coats under his name (he does not use his surname, Balaila).
Luna and Argiriou are among only a handful of companies taking part in both Montreal shows. Zuki participated in StyleLab, and “unfortunately, I’m going to Chicago,” he said, lamenting the demise of NAFFEM.
StyleLab Montreal, held in March at the Palais des Congrès, was quiet, with about 60 collections. Organizers said there were 472 buyers among 1,500 registered visitors, mainly from Canada. On the final day, one Canadian buyer who did not want to be named said: “It’s sad it has come to this.’’
Paul Hardy, a Calgary designer very much respected in Canadian fashion circles, said he had no orders at StyleLab, while a trunk show in Calgary garnered $200,000 in orders in 10 days.
Others were more positive, saying sales were not bad and the event was off to a good start.
Dominic Bellissimo, of Hide Society in Toronto, also does the Coterie trade show in New York City and will do Chicago, and both Montreal shows this year. “It’s expensive,’’ he said, adding the vibe at StyleLab was good.
“We’ve lost the U.S. (buyers), but we still have Russia, we still have China. We’re going to go after them. Canada has a great name all around the world.’’
It’s unlikely that Montreal can support two annual shows, most observers said. What’s clear, they noted, is that Montreal has already lost most of the American buyers who, during the ’80s and ’90s, came here in the hundreds. There were as many as 500 exhibitors at Montreal’s annual fur fair in those halcyon years.
The four-day fair, organized by the fur council, featured a gala fashion show and banquet at Place Bonaventure — or more extravagantly, at Le Windsor ballrooms, with models dripping in jewels and draped in furs showing the styles from hundreds of collections. Audience members — editors from Vogue, buyers from Russia, the U.S., Europe and Asia, and Montreal retailers and furriers — also put on the glitz. But NAFFEM had been declining in attendance steadily over several years, and it appears the blame game is at play. The numbers of Canadian exports tell the larger story. Just as in textiles, manufacturing has moved offshore.
Even as total fur exports climbed to more than $987 million in 2013, almost triple the $347.3 million in 1988, the proportion of fur garments and accessories exported plummeted, according to Statistics Canada. In 1988, Canada exported $183.8 million in fur garments; by last year, that figure was down to $23.4 million. By contrast, in 1988 the figure for raw furs exported was $142.6 million; last year, we exported $945 million worth of raw fur.
Canada is increasingly exporting its raw and dressed pelts (skins that are tanned or finished in some way) to China or other countries that then manufacturer them and might even sell them back here.
Herscovici and others have long explained NAFFEM’S decline as the result of the rising Canadian dollar and the increasing cost for Americans to come to Montreal.
Chicago is a transportation hub, making it easy for Americans to fly in if only for a day, with no passports required, Fazekas said.
Chicago International Luxury Outerwear Expo, set for April 27-29, will have about 85 exhibitors, with about 20 from Montreal — “pretty much everybody,” Fazekas said. There were about 60 fur manufacturers in Montreal 20 years ago, and about 100 when Fazekas first started 40 years ago.
“It’s going a be a major, major show for North America,” Fazekas said of Chicago.
NAFFEM was getting stale, said Natural Furs’ Christina Nacos. The 2013 show, in May, was late, Place Bonaventure was depressing and the mood was blah, she said. “It had to reinvent itself.’’
Natural, which creates furs with designers like Hilary Radley and UNTTLD, is participating only in StyleLab and Chicago.
But Nacos is happy with StyleLab and happy with the fur council’s efforts on behalf of the industry. Its marketing initiatives — Fur is Green, Beautifully Canadian and the Design Network — have been very well received abroad, she said.
Outerwear Extravaganza is taking place Sunday through Tuesday at Bonsecours Market in Old Montreal. It has about 40 exhibitors repre- senting about 50 brands, and about 200 buyers, mainly from Canada, with 25 or 30 Americans, Fazekas said.
“Montreal does not need two shows, that’s for sure,’’ he said. “Unfortunately, that’s what happened.”
Fazekas said he started his show because “there was no StyleLab’’ when NAFFEM died. Herscovici said StyleLab was being discussed well before the end of the NAFFEM lease at Place Bonaventure.
“Through the grapevine, I heard there was going to be a StyleLab,’’ Fazekas said, adding he offered the fur council a partnership, which was refused.
“We decided we were going to go head-to-head. And may the best man win,’’ Fazekas said.
The fur council is a nonprofit industry group, funded through participation fees in the trade shows. It represents manufacturers and retailers and works to educate the public about fur. It also encourages designers to integrate fur and generally defends the industry in the face of antifur activists. It gets government subsidies for export programs.
With no show, there is no council, said Teresa Éloy, marketing consultant for the council who together with consultant Kevin Graff came up with the plan to expand the reach of the show to accessories and ready-to-wear fashion as well as fur. The show had to adapt, she said. Participation was also expensive, she noted, with exhibitors paying $1,500 to $35,000 for a booth at Place Bonaventure.
Herscovici, who has lobbied passionately for the fur industry for 17 years, is clearly upset and angry over the competing trade shows.
“It’s a free country and people can do what they choose. However, we are concerned that if we duplicate or fragment too much it’s only going to weaken Montreal’s presence as a fashion centre,’’ he said.
Afrozen lynx carcass hangs upside down, chained to the beam outside the door of a western Alberta cabin, still dusted with snow.
The big cat may thaw for two days by a wood stove before being skinned. Gordy Klassen found the lynx, along with squirrels and martens, as he roared along his trap line on a snowmobile. The lynx died by a semicircle of branches driven into the ground and baited with scented paste and bird parts. It didn’t take the bait; the cat was caught by a second snare laid behind the main trap.
“That’s a paycheque,” says Klassen, 55, one of Canada’s last professional trappers, saying the hide will fetch perhaps $350. “Some days you get a great run and some days you go out and there’s nothing.”
Just 455 Canadians in a population of 35 million called hunting and trapping their job in Statistics Canada’s latest household survey; the least common occupation in a nation that had its origins as a fur-trading colony overseen by Hudson’s Bay Co. Connections to the land are now scarce, with seven in 10 Canadians living in urban areas while demand for fur clothing has waned.
“It’s taken us so many thousands of years to gain these skills — what a shame if they are lost,” Klassen said on a 64-kilometre journey across land known more for timber and energy resources. “We may have elevated our standard of living because of oil and gas, but to think that we’ve lost these rhythms, it’s dangerous.”
The 455 hunters and trappers counted in 2011 is down from 1,200 recorded in 2006 and 1,185 in 2001. The most recent survey marks the first time the occupation has fallen to least popular in Canada.
The difficulties facing a professional trapper are clear. The $350 a lynx pelt brings today compares with $1,500 in the 1980s, Klassen said. Prey can elude someone who’s trapped for four decades.
“He walked right past my trap,” Klassen said after spotting marten tracks near a creek. Another snare had its bait raided by a crafty lynx that left only footprints.
The fur industry shrank in the late 1980s as a weak economy hurt prices and government policy shifted toward strict licence requirements, said Glen Doucet, executive director of the Ottawa-based Fur Institute of Canada.
“I wouldn’t say the trade is in decline,” Doucet said. “It’s more professional and the people involved in the trade have a more diversified stream of income.”
Demand for fur clothing has declined as animal-rights advocates question the treatment of trapped animals and the killing of seals, which has drawn a European Union ban. Klassen and other hunters said tougher regulations led to more humane traps that kill in a few minutes.
Leona Aglukkaq, Canada’s environment minister, who represents the northern territory of Nunavut, said people living in the Arctic take care of animals they’ve depended on for thousands of years.
“In the North growing up, you live off the land,” she said by telephone from Geneva March 17 after testifying against the EU seal ban at a World Trade Organization hearing. “It is in our interest for people who depend on the wildlife in our backyard to have a strong conservation plan in place.”
Trapping still has “ques- tionable ethics,” Dan Mathews, senior vicepresident of campaigns at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said by telephone from Norfolk, Va. “We learned that you don’t have to kill animals to survive and in fact it’s bad business at this point.”
Trapping was big business for the voyageurs and coureurs de bois who paddled North American rivers centuries ago, seeking beaver pelts to feed a European fashion craze. King Charles II of England granted control of the territory known as Rupert’s Land to the Hudson’s Bay Co. to establish a furtrading network in 1670. Can- ada bought the seven million square kilometres that covers present-day Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, and parts of Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Nunavut, for $1.5 million in 1869, two years after the country was established.
Mark Downey, chief executive officer of Fur Harvesters Auction Inc. in North Bay, Ont., says few of the 22,000 North Americans who send him furs make trapping their main income source.
“These trappers, some of them doctors, some of them are lawyers, some of them are contract workers who build houses in the summer and trap in the winter,” he said.
Wrangler Hamm, 29, began trapping four years ago to supplement his day job as an emergency room nurse. Most of his work is trapping animals that threaten people and livestock, he said, and the money isn’t substantial.
“It’s too much risk for what’s involved to solely say that’s what you are going to do for the rest of your life,” Hamm said by telephone from Central Butte, Sask. He surveyed 53 trappers online for an industry presentation and found many don’t consider their work to be a business.
Mike Moroz, who gave up trapping 25 years ago, agrees “there is no such thing as a professional hunter” today. Low fur prices and higher costs make the profession impossible, he said.
“You might make yourself in a good year $25,000 or $30,000, which is poverty,” said Moroz, 57, who brings hunters to his Klotz Lake Camp near Longlac, Ont.
Moroz called trapping “a labour of love” because “you see bear, moose, wolves, wildlife, it’s always something different.”
That love died when he sent a batch of furs to an auction house and received a disappointing cheque for his labour. Furs he estimated were worth between $4,500 and $6,000 fetched just $450.
“I yelled ‘Screw this!’ and I never trapped after that, because it doesn’t matter how much you love it, you still have to pay your expenses.”
Klassen remains hopeful. During an overnight cabin stay that included a dinner of fried moose meat and potatoes with sips of beer, tea and scotch, Klassen said he’s opening a 20,000-square foot hunting supply store close to his ranch near DeBolt, Alta. He’s drawing on experience from the construction businesses that made him rich and gave him the freedom to trap full-time.
“I’m one of the 455,” Klassen said. “That’s all I have done for the past 10 years” since handing control of his other businesses to his son.
“I talked with my wife about it as I was filling it in,” he said, referring to the household survey. “I wrote it in big block letters — TRAPPING — and told my wife, ‘We’ll see how the government likes that.’ ”
This winter, Klassen cut his trap lines back to 60 or so kilometres from the normal 320 or 480, because of harsh weather with wind chills around -40 C. Still, he says trapping remains more meaningful than oil riches, and he’s passing along skills to aspiring trappers.
“The No. 1 reason I think they do it is because of a love of wilderness and a real passion for the resource,” Klassen said of today’s trappers. “They don’t run away from tough things, they actually embrace the hardship.”
“The No. 1 reason I think they do it is because of a love of wilderness and a real passion for the resource”
TRAPPER GORDY KLASSEN