Nunavut sealskins face world’s cold shoulder

For the past few years, Nunavut has aggressively promoted its sealskin fashion collections at Montreal’s annual fur trade show with a large number of garments and a team of designers, seamstresses, models and government officials.

But this year, Nunavut isn’t making the same effort.

“Those days are gone,” said Larry Simpson, Nunavut’s senior advisor for fisheries and sealing, who manned a modest booth all by himself this week at the North American Fur and Fashion Exposition.

That’s because, despite sealskin’s legendary warmth and softness, the international fur market is a tough, cold place.

In this market, tradition means nothing and being different can lose money. Perception is everything, and the negative publicity around this spring’s harp seal hunt in Eastern Canada is hurting the sealskin market, even though Nunavut hunters only harvest ring seals.

“We’ve got another nice collection. It will raise some eyebrows,” Simpson said. “The trouble is it doesn’t change things down there. It doesn’t have that much impact.”

Ironically, this news comes at the same time as a long list of organizations met this week in Iqaluit to form a new group called the “Nunavut Economic Forum,” which is supposed to find ways of developing Nunavut’s economy.

The NAFFEM fur show in Montreal usually attracts 5,000 buyers who place hundreds of millions of dollars worth of orders for fur fashions.

The fur show promotes the Canadian fur industry as sustainable and environmentally conscientious, although native-trapped furs only account for a small percentage of furs sold commercially in North America. The rest are farmed furs, such as chinchilla or mink.

Canadian fur exports have risen 26 per cent since 1999, yet little of this has come to Nunavut.

“Every few years we evaluate the strategy and see what makes sense and what doesn’t. That’s happening now. We can only do what we can and get the best bang for the buck. We’re asking if our objectives are being met by certain components, including this Nunavut Inuit Collection at NAFFEM,” Simpson said.

One hurdle posed by this commercial market is filling large orders, a challenge that the small-scale cottage sewing industry in Nunavut hasn’t been able to take on successfully.

Most of this year’s collection was actually sewn in the South.

“If you get a hundred orders, you can’t produce because of that capacity problem,” Simpson said. “We’re ahead of ourselves in some ways.”

The plan now, said Simpson, is to look away from the high-end market for sealskin.

“There’s really not much of a market, and we can’t produce them and we certainly can’t produce them competitively. There’s a real gap between what you produce as a fashion statement and what you can economically produce for a real market,” Simpson said. “So, if we get orders for these coats, forget it, they’re too complex. We want to shift it to more marketable things that people will wear.”

The Nunavut Inuit Collection contains a lot of pieces that are one-of-a-kind couture creations, which aren’t even worth selling because they’re worth more as public relations vehicles.

“We know we can never reproduce it. You sell a coat, [and] it’s gone,” Simpson said.

Another hurdle to marketing Nunavut sealskin products is the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act. This legislation stopped the import of marine mammal products into the States in 1972, and makes it illegal for American fur wholesalers and retailers to import Inuit seal-skin.

“Fur still has a real stigma. You can say if you hang in there for 30 years, it’ll start unwinding, but the show in Montreal, it’s really directed towards the U.S. market, and you can’t send seals there,” Simpson said.

So, the plan is to keep existing collection pieces more for public relations purposes and develop a northern market.

The premiere of future collections could take place at Toonik Tyme rather than in Montreal at the fur show.

“Sometimes you have to tweak your focus,” Simpson said. “We’ve learned we can’t sell a lot of coats made in the North in the South.”