“Being from Alaska is a good selling point because
people here know about cold, wet feet.”
A bride is carefully pulling her wedding dress over her perfectly styled hair in Homer, Alaska. It’s a cool July day, typical Alaska. Like most brides, she has spent countless hours planning each detail of her wedding and incorporating her own flavor.
For this particular bride, that unique style includes an Alaskan favorite, Xtratuf neoprene boots. But before donning her boots, she slips on a pair of knee-high fleece socks specially designed in her wedding colors, green and purple.
Those handmade socks are called SLUGS. And one woman in Ketchikan, Alaska is making rubber boots more comfortable one pair at a time.
It all began on a children’s sewing machine in 2010. Creator Rayana White only had so much time to get a product ready in order to participate in the annual Blueberry Festival hosted each August in her hometown Ketchikan, Alaska.
One thing she knew for certain — in Ketchikan it rains. A lot. And like other places in Alaska, many people fight the wet with Xtratufs, or similar rubber boots.
She decided that in order to make the plain boots warmer, more attractive and more comfortable, she would sew fleece liners and sell them at the festival, calling them SLUGS because she loves slugs and because their shape reminds her of the slimy critters.
“I went through four yards of gray fleece trying to make them work,” White says. “There were certain things about fabric I just didn’t know.”
“Halfway through the [festival] they were almost all gone,” she says. Her success at the Blueberry festival inspired her to develop a business around SLUGS. She created her company With The Rain, which sells these liners through the online shop Etsy.
Etsy is essentially an online storefront for people to sell products in the virtual world. Etsy spotlights individual products on the homepage and the Etsy blog and website send out daily emails to subscribers on hot items.
Free advertising and extremely low costs. White pays $0.30 per item listing for three months. Selling through Etsy has also allowed White to market her SLUGS to people outside of Ketchikan and be able to supply SLUGS for such events as the wedding in Homer. She has even begun selling them overseas.
“I figured they were such a big hit here, I could sell them all over the world.” Her successful SLUGS have crept their way to France , Greece, the Netherlands and even Hawaii. “I sent a pair to Texas and I couldn’t help but wonder if they were going to wear these in cowboy boots.”
She thinks that, “being from Alaska is a good selling point because people here know about cold, wet feet.”
White is a photographer and an artistic soul. She has developed different techniques in creating her liners, including sewing on a vintage button that she handpicks for each pair of SLUGS.
“I’m like an old man, I love collecting buttons,” White says.
“I also bought an old sweater and cut it up and sewed it on the top of some SLUGS,” White says. This began a new line of SLUGS with second-hand sweaters attached. “I bought them from local thrift stores. I can only make four pairs per sweater so there are only four pairs out there.”
Running With the Rain
Along with Etsy, White markets through social media such as Facebook, Twitter and her blog. Other than a couple local shops in Ketchikan and some in Anchorage, White conducts all of her business online.
“It’s also important to cross your social media,” White says, indicating that linking all of her social sites has helped her market her products successfully.
“Facebook is for fans to keep up with what I am doing. If I have a new style of SLUGS I can post it.”
White still works a day job but hopes to run With the Rain full time. “I think it’s going to happen soon,” she hints. She has now hit 400 sales since March and the number is still climbing. As a one-person show with a virtual storefront she advises other entrepreneurs, “don’t get impatient because you learn things all along the way.”
Connect with Rayana White and visit With The Rain at:
www.withtheraincomesslugs.blogspot.com
Photos courtesy of Rayana White
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Thank you for the feature and the support!!
I’m happy to share that I have now passed 500 sales have sold 100 pairs of SLUGS in less than a month!