A Different Way to Skin a Wallet : Retailing: A small firm in Alaska has struck gold with “leather” goods made from salmon and halibut skins.
An exotic new industry here--producing wallets, purses, checkbook covers, watchbands and belts--has been spun off from the yuppie generation’s dislike of skin and bones in canned salmon.
The products are made from salmon and halibut skins.
“Packers began canning some of their salmon without skins and bones four years ago to try to tap a younger market. They ran into a problem right off the bat: what to do with the skins,” Jerry Garner, 42, president of Alaskins Leather Co., explained.
At first, the skins were dumped into the ocean but became an environmental problem, choking off life on the sea floor. Then along came the fish skin leather company here.
“Salmon and halibut skins are a maze of interlocking fibers--tough, durable and 2 1/2 times stronger than cowhide and deerskin,” Garner said. “Yet they are supple, smooth and rich in texture, making them ideal as a leather product.”
Garner and three friends--Mike Howard, 34, of the Alaska State Corrections Department, Dan Callaghan, 35, a construction supervisor, and Mike Ban, 32, a real estate broker--each invested $1,500 and started Alaskins in March, 1987.
Howard and his father, a Wisconsin tanner, developed a formula for tanning the fish skins. The company started modestly in a Juneau storefront, tanning and manufacturing four styles of men’s wallets and recording gross sales of just $27,000 in 1987.
The next year, Angie Heck, 32, an executive secretary with the Alaska State Transportation Department, Royit O. Arns, 32, an artist, Roger Lewis, 49, a precious metals dealer, and Jim Shine, 34, a welder, invested in the company and, like the others, became members of both management and labor.
“I’m the president,” Garner said, “and everyone else is a vice president. We work 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week as sole members of the company’s labor force. So far, none of us have taken any money out of the business. We pile it back in.”
During 1988, Alaskins made 12 different leather products with gross sales that year of $127,000. In 1989, there were 53 different lines in 10 colors, and the company expanded into manufacturing reindeer hide and deerskin leather goods. Sales approached $250,000.
Alaskins’ products are being sold in 170 stores in Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Washington, Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan and Florida.
There is a precedent for converting salmon and halibut skin into leather products. Alaska’s Tlingit Indians made boots and rain gear from them until about a century ago. And a Juneau veterinarian, the late Buck Weaver, is said to have made halibut wallets for 30 years.
The original concept of Alaskins was to tan the fish skins and sell the leather to other manufacturers who would make the purses and wallets.
“But as we developed our first prototypes of men’s wallets, local residents snapped them up,” said Lewis, the vice president for marketing. “We opened a retail outlet and decided we would not only do the tanning but make the product as well.”
The company has a tanning plant at the north end of this small city--Alaska’s capital--and a processing plant and retail store at the south end.
“We have developed our own equipment. For example, we use an old cement mixer for drying, a washing machine motor . . . as an agitator for tanning,” said Callaghan, the vice president for operations.
Canneries ship the skins to Alaskins’ tanning facility. The tanning process takes seven days, ending with the skins stapled to 4-by-8-foot plywood boards for three days for final drying.
Fish skin wallets retail for $25 to $75, and some purses with elaborate designs sell for as much as $285 each.
“As Americans are turning away from vinyl back to real leather, we expect to capitalize on the trend,” said Shine, the vice president of Alaskins’ tanning operation. “We believe we are on to something that will catch on and become very big within a few years.”
