At the Naataq Gear shop off Abbott Road in south Anchorage, rows of new garments line the shelves while locally made candles create a warm, inviting atmosphere.
The store’s new manager, Amy Bioff, is on deck to greet customers. While her mother and owner of the store, Alice Bioff, prepares for one of the biggest sales weekends of the year, she’s busy overlooking the day to day operations of the store.
"I absolutely love it, and I'm able to learn so much and really get into the details of how all of this runs," Amy Bioff said.
Up until this year, Naataq Gear was based in the Federal Building on Nome's Front Street. Alice Bioff said several things led her to relocate the business to Anchorage.
“We have adult kids here now, and so for personal reasons, we moved down here, and then of course we brought the shop with us,” Alice Bioff said.
With the day-to-day duties handed off to her daughter, Alice Bioff said she’s working on rolling out new products. Naataq Gear has already expanded its catalog through a partnership with the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. Naataq Gear now produces a line of medical-grade hats, pants and shirts.
“They were going to a new color coding system at the hospital, so different colors represent different nursing teams there," she explained.
When Alice Bioff first started the business, she spent years searching for the right material. She said her flagship jackets needed to be wind and waterproof – yet breathable.
She finally found what she was looking for from a Canadian supplier, who shipped the material to Minnesota for final assembly. But new tariffs on Canadian goods imposed by President Donald Trump forced Bioff to rethink her entire supply chain, including materials for a new fleece jacket she hoped to launch this fall.
“We were ready for production, and then this hit,” she said. “So if I wanted to do and change the fabric, it would just add on more whole new set of expenses and cost, and so I'm just deciding to hold off.”
Alice Bioff met with her supplier and decided to source the materials and assemble her products entirely in Canada. Now, Naataq Gear’s goods come from Vancouver, but her tariff troubles aren’t over yet.
“This time, the tariffs are a little different. They're not putting tariffs just on the fabric itself, now it's on a finished product. So this year we had to cut our production in half,” Alice Bioff said. “So we can and still make the Atmik and the Sikus, but we cannot do the Nunas and the windbreakers because of the tariffs on the type of fabric that these are made in.”
Despite the challenges, Naataq’s small team is ready for one of its biggest weeks of the year. The company is bringing its full range of garments to the AFN convention.
The mother-daughter team acknowledged they’re also bringing a piece of Inupiaq culture to the convention.
“We see the excitement, we see the appreciation for being able to grab a jacket that represents our culture and feel that culture again, you know, like a sense of being home or part of the culture,” Alice Bioff said.
“I agree 100% We get comments like that every now and then, and people are really happy to see this kind of stuff here in Anchorage now,” Amy Bioff added.
The convention is taking place from Oct. 22 to 24 at the Dena’ina Center in Anchorage.
