Sometimes a zipper can do more than just keep the parka on your back.
Sometimes a zipper can help hold people together, enabling sewers practising traditional arts to keep their communities suitably clothed.
Such is the case in Pond Inlet, at the northern tip of Baffin Island, where two weeks ago Inuit women received donated zippers, buttons, snaps, Velcro and fabric ends from outerwear brand Canada Goose.
The Toronto-based manufacturer has started sending monthly shipments of remnants to Pond Inlet and Iqaluit, distributing them free through the North West Company, a chain of general stores in the Arctic.
The zippers and other sewing supplies are prized by the Inuit because they are hard to come by in the North, not to mention expensive, says Kevin Spreekmeester, Canada Goose's vice-president of marketing.
“We once asked one of the sewers to show us how she made a parka and when she pulled it apart, we saw it was made from old hotel pillow cases, and anything else she could get her hands on. That's when we realized that we could help the Inuit by giving them quality materials for making their traditional clothes.”
The sewer was Meeka Atagootak of Pond Inlet, who visited the Canada Goose factory in Toronto two years ago. Accompanying her was a friend, Rebecca Kiliktee, who specializes in making traditional jackets called amautiq that allow mothers to carry their babies in their hoods.
Both women are featured in the Canada Goose 50th-anniversary coffee-table book. “I make maybe 20 parkas a year,” Atagootak tells an interviewer. “They are for my family and friends, or whoever wants one. I don't get paid. I do it because someone needs one. It's what I do in the community.”
While today the parka is an internationally coveted fashion item, it is still a basic means of survival in the North. But Canada Goose's parkas, worn by the likes of film directors and the royal families of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, cost as much as $1,200.
To Canada Goose, being priced out of reach of many Inuit posed a problem, especially as Arctic iconography features prominently on the 52-year-old company's logo.
“We couldn't make a cheaper jacket in Canada that was as good a quality as our brand requires,” Spreekmeester says. “And so we struggled with how to be a bigger part of the community as a way of saying thank you. Giving them materials is how we give back.”
When the first shipment arrived in Pond Inlet on June 11, the lineup outside the North West Company extended well down the road. “I just hope we can keep up with the demand,” Spreekmeester says.
