NOMAR Offers One-Stop Shopping, from Fishing Gear to Maritime Clothing
On a winter’s day in 1982, a couple of fishermen walked into Kate Mitchell’s canvas and upholstery shop in Homer with a problem: their net brailers were marking their catch, so many of their fish were downgraded by processors.
They asked Mitchell if she would build a bag that would work to quickly offload the catch, but not mark the fish. “They had a problem, and I had a sewing machine,” recalls Mitchell, founder of NOMAR, the now well-known marine company with an 18,000-square-foot manufacturing and retail store facility in Homer, Alaska, with and customers nationwide.
Seafood harvesters in Bristol Bay and False Pass were delivering their salmon harvests in seine web bags and fish pressed against the web were getting marked, making them of lower value to processors.
So, Mitchell got ...