The last ten months have been a wild blur! I want to tell you all about it!
Last October, George and I bought our first house. It took nearly 3 months of renovations before we could move in! While we were working full time and renovating every night until the wee hours, it was one of those experiences that took us to every imaginable state of being; joy, regret, exhaustion, doubt, optimism, dread. You name it, we experienced it. But when it was done and we moved in, oh the peace. The rest. The serenity. All of that was happening during my busiest time of year in my store - Christmas shopping season. Days were long, nights were longer, and the payoff was enormous.
I spent a bit of January enjoying the slower pace allowing myself to do a little feathering of our new nest and indulging in slower art practices like botanical ink illustration. As the first month of the new year drew to a close and I started to think about what I wanted to do in the store for the coming tourist season, I received correspondence from a friend in a neighbouring community that a gorgeous retail location that I'd had my eye on for some time was available for lease.
A little back story for you - in 2019, well before the pandemic, George and I were looking at leasing a small store in Skagway Alaska. Skagway is a cruise ship port and in a typical season, they welcome more than 1.4M visitors. It is a 2h drive for us to get from our home to Skagway so it's been part of our growth plan for a long time. So when we heard that this premium location was up for grabs, we jumped at the opportunity.
The following months were FULL of learning, complex challenges, emails, attorneys, expenses, and a few intensely frustrating moments. Since February, we negotiated a great lease with a fantastic family, worked with an attorney to create a corporation in Alaska, secured George's work visa, got all the necessary permits, licenses, and insurance to operate our store and I made almost all of the inventory for the store (which is 4x larger than my Yukon store!) I've had to learn about importing products for human consumption and working with FDA requirements, I found a broker to support our importing of goods from the Yukon, I developed great working relationships with local border protection and folks at the US Fish and Wildlife department (importing animal products). All of this was learned as we went along and has made it possible for us to have our doors open for the better part of the cruise ship season.
Some of the challenges along the way included the fact that our products are from wild animals and required tremendous amounts of documentation and there isn't a handbook or roadmap per se for pulling off an endeavour like this. It was all figured out as individual issues arose. Not efficient but definitely memorable and we got all the info we needed eventually. Additionally, cruise travellers haven't completely returned to pre-pandemic numbers which is disappointing but understandable. Also this year, one of the docks sustained some damage from rock slides and the bank continues to have instability issues so losing one dock meant that several ships weren't even coming into the port.
That aside, it was an exciting season that netted us a ton of learning and insight. It laid the foundation for an even better season next year. Our shelves are almost all full and ready to be explored by new visitors that we can't wait to meet. We made friends, shared many laughs, and appear in the travel journals and IG feeds of countless people. All in all, it was the very best start-up year we could have asked for. I can't wait to do it all again next year!
If you were one of the wonderful people who paid us a visit this year, please tag us on Instagram @wildyukonfurs and @vanessa.aegirsdottir