Like the Sitka spruce that thrives in the damp soil along the West Coast, islanders Rene Gauthier and Andrew Paine were drawn to the ocean.
While 21-year-old students at the University of Victoria, the surfers would sneak away to ride waves whenever they could.
It was during those excursions they came up with the idea to run a surfboard company, which they simply called Sitka.
When Gauthier and Paine started in 2002, they made boards out of a garage. Today, they run a successful company with three locations – Victoria, Vancouver, and New Zealand – and 38 employees. Along with surfboards, Sitka sells clothing for men and women, outdoor gear, fishing supplies, skateboards, and more.
This week Sitka opened its newest Vancouver location, moving from Cypress Street and Fourth Avenue to 2127 West Fourth. They also launched a crowdfunding campaign for the recently created Sitka Society for Conservation, a non-profit arm of the company that lends financial and moral support to reputable wildness conservation agencies.
The idea for the society came out of a company retreat last year, when they were taking stock of their business values.
“We really started looking at what we are doing,” Gauthier explains during a phone interview while commuting on the ferry. “We declared our vision of the company to be a world in balance, and then we started looking at the company and realizing there are a lot of pieces in here that don’t line up with our vision currently.”
Rather than launching another group that would compete with existing environmental organizations, they plan to use their storefronts and customer base to help raise funds and awareness for agencies that align with their values. The initiatives they plan to support include Pacific Wild, Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition and Leadnow.ca, Gauthier says.
“We saw that we could have an impact – people aren’t just able to walk in off the street and talk to somebody from the Sierra Club or whatever organization,” he says. “However, they can come in and have that conversation with us.”
They are also thinking politically.
“The current government is having a serious effect on the environment right now, essentially disregarding a lot of science out there – removing rules and procedures that have been put in place for good reason over the last number of years,” Gauthier says, adding, “we’re not down with that.”
Along with the crowdfunding efforts, the company is working towards having 100 per cent of its production in North America by 2016 (they’re about 60 per cent there) and striving to use organic fabrics wherever possible.
Meanwhile, some of the standouts in the Sitka clothing line, which features earthy-toned active wear, include the ladies Triple Threat pullover with three sleek Sitka trees on the front. (The company’s logo is a tall, simple-but-striking Sitka tree.) A bestseller in the men’s line is the zip sweatshirt with an embroidered Sitka tree on the back.
Another menswear stunner is the fitted Oyster zip hooded wool sweater in deep navy blue. The pocketed piece would work in the boardroom or the beach.
“It has to be timeless – that’s what we are going for,” Gauthier says about Sitka’s outerwear ethos.
