New tariff is last straw for Sitka craft shop
- Daily Sitka Sentinel
- 20 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Cathy Li
Special to the Daily Sitka Sentinel
Though she doesn’t go around advertising it, Leslie Dupuis, owner of the craft store The Raven’s Hook, wouldn’t mind the title of Sitka’s “crafting mob boss.”
If you were in the middle of a full-blown crafting emergency, you knew Dupuis had your back — that is, until The Raven’s Hook, after five years in business, closed its doors on Dec. 31.
Dupuis cited multiple factors for closure, but the throughline was rising costs that made running the store unsustainable. She had been struggling with the decision since August — she called Raven’s Hook her “baby” — but by early November, when her 231 Lincoln Street business wasn’t profitable enough to break even, she knew it was time.
"It hasn’t sunk in yet," she said. "I think it’ll be strange to go past that space, but I think it’ll always hold a special place in my heart.”
Dupuis tried everything to keep Raven’s Hook afloat, from cutting her own pay and taking a part-time job to finding different suppliers in the United States.
“But then you get to the point where you don’t have enough money to pay your rent and you don’t have enough money to pay your employees,” Dupuis said. “I knew it was time to close the doors.”
In addition to the usual costs of rent and staffing, Dupuis, like countless other small businesses around the country, faced an unexpected hurdle in August, when the federal government suspended the "de minimis” tariff exemption. It had allowed most packages valued at $800 or less to enter the U.S. duty-free, and with minimal paperwork. Suddenly, Dupuis would have to pay more for nearly everything in her shop.
She said many people had the misconception that she could easily switch to American manufacturers, but many of her products were simply not available from U.S. sources.
"I tried to look for American manufacturers for a bit, but once you do the research, all the supplies are coming internationally. It’s a global world. Every business is global in some way or another,” Dupuis said. “For example, there just aren’t American suppliers of fine paints because we don’t have the pigments here. We don’t have the factories here. It takes so much money to build that kind of supply system, which we just don’t have.”
Dupuis wasn't the only Sitkan who felt the sting of new federal tariff policies on their business. Jim Michener, co-owner of Alaska Pure Sea Salt, said he feels “unsure and nervous” because of how tariffs are affecting his ability to obtain products from outside the United States.
It’s not so much the “de minimis” tariff exemption, he said, as much as industry-specific tariffs that make it unaffordable for importers to carry the products that he sells.
For example, Norwegian HeidalsOst brown cheese is no longer being imported since tariffs targeting it went into effect, which Michener said had a "loyal following" in Sitka.
“It’s not that we’re going to raise prices; it’s just not going to be available,” Michener said.
Michener also was nervously anticipating the 107% tariff on Italian pastas that was supposed to go into effect this month, though it was recently announced that the rates were reduced to 24-29%.
He said this uncertainty is affecting his ability to maintain a successful business.
“It’s just not stable. I can’t project what costs or revenues will be. We’ve done everything we can to absorb the tariffs and we’re at a point where if we can’t absorb anymore, we’re just going to break,” Michener said. “We’re at a real inflection point here.”
Michener’s business focuses on locally produced foods, especially Alaskan-made sea salt. The selection of international foods is an add-on.
But if that wasn’t the case and international foods were his main source of revenue, Michener said he “probably would be closing our doors right now.”
Meanwhile, a little way down Lincoln Street from Michener’s store, this is the reality Dupuis is experiencing. After a series of closing sales, she is now starting to sell the store’s displays and furniture.
“That afternoon [I closed], I was looking through old photos and videos with my daughter, and just happened to come upon the year that we were opening the store,” Dupuis said.
Her daughter Kaylee was 6 years old when she opened Raven’s Hook in 2020, and she’s 11 now. Dupuis said she wouldn’t have been able to run her business without Kaylee, who has been her “sticker picker outer and stuffed animal chooser.”
“I definitely feel some mixed emotions: some anger in there, a lot of sadness, but also a sense of relief to have a big thing off my plate so I can focus on other things that are important to me,” Dupuis said. “But I’ll end by saying I appreciate Sitka so much.
"It’s such an amazing creative community. I love seeing people doing traditional crafts and kids starting new crafts. I love seeing the professional artists and their work. It’s been such an honor to be a part of that as the supplier, but also just to be a part of people’s stories.”
• This article originally appeared in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.
