THEIR STORIES
Allison Grover has been a creative force her entire life. Jewelry making has been a passion of hers for decades with inspiration coming from detritus she finds along the beaches of the Pacific Northwest.
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With detritus as her medium and her torch and foredom as her tools, she shapes, forms and designs amazing unique pieces of wearable art. As an artist, Allison eschews the ordinary and embraces the challenge that every found item presents.
She's created works of art from crab claws, barnacles, oyster shells, limpets, chitons, beach glass and more. Each jewel presents a different challenge in her creative journey from deciding the type of jewelry to design to the painstaking process of designing the setting for each item. Every shell and piece of detritus is different and that results in a completely new process and completed work of art.
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Graeme Esarey founded Ignik after attempting to transit the Northwest Passage, from Alaska to Greenland, with his family. In 2018 Graeme Esarey, an outdoor industry executive, quit his job to set sail on an old raceboat called Dogbark with his wife and their two daughters, ages nine and twelve.
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The goal was to navigate from Seattle to Greenland via Alaska and the fabled Northwest Passage. With a rotating crew of Graeme’s parents (in their 70s) and writer/photographer friends (in their 30s), this multigenerational team performed research on sea surface temperatures for NOAA, visited remote Native Alaskan settlements carved from the permafrost, and were followed by whales, chased by muskoxen, and, at times, enveloped by sea ice as far as the eye could see.
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Ultimately, with storm-driven ice blocking the Passage, the expedition turned back, but Graeme was changed forever by the wildness of the place—and by witnessing the direct impact climate change is having on the wildlife, landscape, and stalwart people of the Arctic.
Today Ignik makes high-quality, environmentally thoughtful heating products for the wilderness. We enable more folks to get outside earlier and remain outside longer.
Jack Seifert is nothing less than a Northwest renaissance man. Harking from Texas he's become a Northwest adventurer and purveyor of all things fun.
As a licensed masseuse, accomplished BBQ chef and brewer, Jack is a man with many valuable talents. Its commonplace for Jack's massage clients to recover from his deep tissue grinding sessions with a cold home brew from the tap and a couple strips of succulent brisket straight from his homemade, backyard smoker that is nimbly avoided by his pet chicken.
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Jack is also a giver and has donated his time and money to his passion for building sustainable communities in Africa through his support for the World Bicycle Relief organization. Feel good knowing that a portion of every sale will be donated to the effort.
His passions run the gambit but his personal drive for bike touring led him to create bike bags that he couldn't find anywhere else.
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To make the bags he wanted, he sought out the tools he needed and with his trusted Juki commercial sewing machine, attention to detail, and innovative approach from being an avid biker himself, his designs have started to pop up on bikes rolling through the Northwest region. Bags By Jack is the culmination of thousands of road miles and a passion for making things that work.
