Nome woman finds business success with a modern take on a traditional garment

In the corner of Norton Sound, upriver from the village of Koyuk, there are many great horned owls living in the woods. In Iñupiaq they are called naataq. One year at fish camp, Alice Bioff’s bunnik, her eldest daughter, was given the name naataq, on account of her large, round, owlish brown eyes.

These days, the word naataq holds another significance for Bioff: It’s the name of her business, Naataq Gear, makers of traditional Indigenous clothing with a distinctly modern approach.

“We’re happy to offer a garment that’s inspired by our traditional atikluk, kuspuk, to our communities here in Alaska,” Bioff said, using the respective Iñupiaq and Yup’ik words for what is, mostly, the same waist-length hooded outer jacket that’s been a staple of Indigenous clothing in Alaska for generations. “We see that there’s a need for that. People are so excited to see this garment.”

Bioff’s products look like a lot of semi-formal contemporary atikluks: solid blocks of subtle colors with a vertical zipper running down the middle between deep, swooping pockets, a bit of flair from glittery trim touches at the edges.

But the twist is in the construction: Naataq jackets are made from a fancy industrial fabric called Dintex, a sort of super polyester, with a protective film washed onto the fibers.

“It’s water resistant, windproof, and breathable,” Bioff said, ducked into an alcove not far from her booth at the Alaska Federation of Natives craft fair in downtown Anchorage.

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Even early in the morning, before the conference’s officially scheduled start, she was seeing a brisk flow of customers, pulling red, purple and black atikluks off a densely packed rack to try them on before a full-length mirror.

“This is huge for us,” Bioff said of the AFN convention. “This is where we get to connect with all the communities and our customers.”

Business is very good. In just a few years, Naataq coats have gone from an experimental prototype Bioff fiddled with at her kitchen table in Nome, where she and her husband have raised four kids, to coveted performance gear with cultural cachet all over the state.

The idea came off a luxury cruise ship. In 2016, when the Crystal Serenity docked in Nome, unleashing a novel flood of some 1,000 wealthy visitors into the gritty hub town. Bioff had been hired on for the day by a local tourism company, and a tall gentleman in a white cowboy hat asked if the atikluk she happened to be wearing was waterproof.

“That planted the seed,” she said, and she spent that winter beginning to research different designs and materials.

Within a few years, she’d developed a prototype and connected with a company based in St. Paul, Minnesota, that could manufacture it with the performance materials she knew would be critical for the coats to be more than just fashionable, but functional for real rural Alaska living.

“They’re very much made to be worn. Utilitarian. Outerwear garments that can be used,” Bioff said.

Though she sees the atikluks as artful, they are not regalia. Bioff wants them to be worn as people pick berries on the tundra, skiff out to check a salmon net or drive a four-wheeler to pick kids up at school.

And they are. In the beginning, she thought her main market would be tourists and visitors eager to take a piece of Alaska home with them.

“But it wasn’t the case. It was the local Alaskans. And still to this day, they’re the major market, the folks from our communities that love the product,” she said with a satisfied smile.

The leap from a test batch to putting up the money for an initial production run of atikluks was a big one. Bioff has always kept her day job, working as a business planning specialist at Kawerak, the regional nonprofit corporation for the Bering Strait communities. She did not have $30,000 lying around to commission the first 300 jackets she hoped to start selling.

“I had an angel investor,” she said.

Her older brother.

“He said ‘OK, I spot you, but you gotta pay me back,’” Bioff said. “That was a big chunk of change for my brother, who had worked his whole life as an airline refueler. ... He took a chance on his little sister.”

And it worked. Naataq gear is not inexpensive. The higher-end models sell online for $200 or $300 apiece. But sell they did. And the next year, Bioff paid her brother back in full.

Since then, volume has steadily climbed.

“We’re going up to thousands now,” Bioff said of her orders.

Naataq has a brick-and-mortar store on Nome’s Front Street, on the second floor of the post office building. She’s hired on four young people as employees, two to work the store and two others to manage her inventory. The little space, which used to be the court clerk’s office, also sells works by local artists. The operation generates a little money, but Nome is still a small town, and the overwhelming share of sales come through e-commerce and social media marketing, Bioff said.

The gamble was not purely financial. At the venture’s outset, Bioff was anxious she’d face criticism or disapproval for taking an Indigenous cultural item and having it produced by an industrial factory out-of-state with nontraditional touches like synthetic materials with pocket zippers.

“We were a little nervous, because it’s a traditional garment, but we asked elders, we asked folks back up home, ‘Is this OK to do?’” Bioff recalled. “And they were OK with that. It was nerve-wracking, but it was accepted.”

She’s not sure where the ceiling for Naataq is. Asked for a ballpark of what the business is worth overall, Bioff sheepishly said, “I have no idea,” breaking into peals of hearty laughter.

But they keep growing. Bioff is readying to release a kids’ line of atikluks. And soon she’s unveiling some new items for sale, although she was cagey about the specifics. The premise, she said, would be no different from the atikluks that have built the brand.

“We’ll be ... providing a product that will perpetuate our thriving, living culture in our communities,” she said. “And to have our traditional garments available for our families, especially our youth.”

With that, she got back to work at her booth, where a line of ladies waited to try on her jackets.