Manufacturing Nordic Skates in Alaska

March 31, 2026

A Q&A about manufacturing Nordic skates with Ermine owner Paxson Woelber

When did you decide to make Nordic skates in Alaska?

I was hooked on Nordic skates from the moment I tried them, back in 2016, and I immediately wanted to see if we could make them here. But ‘here’ wasn’t Alaska — at least not at first. I just wanted to manufacture Nordic skates in the United States, instead of importing them from overseas. I assumed that we’d need to make them in the Lower 48 [the contiguous United States] and then ship them up to Alaska.

Why didn’t you think Nordic skates could be manufactured in Alaska?

I was born and raised in Anchorage, and I know the city pretty well. And my impression was that we just didn’t have much manufacturing capacity. Alaskans are accustomed to looking for things outside of the state. It’s part of the skillset that you develop when you live here. We often default to ‘how can I get this up here?’ rather than ‘can I make this here?’ That attitude partly just reflects the reality of living in a far-flung place, but unfortunately it can also mean that we close ourselves off to opportunities and sell ourselves short.

So what convinced you that Ermine could make Nordic skates in Alaska?

The project that became Ermine began in earnest when my friend Brad Dickerson and I sat down in 2017 or 2018 and started trying to hammer out the details of how to make a Nordic skate. Brad was a serial entrepreneur with an interest in product development. His pragmatic, business-oriented East Coast attitude and skillset was very complementary with my West-coasty background in the outdoors, arts, and design.

We started by looking at a Nordic skate, mentally breaking it into its component parts, and then considering each part individually. Take the blade, for example. There’s a ton going on with a Nordic skate blade, from the grade of steel to the way it’s hardened to the cutting to the finish, etc. So you try to understand one little thing at a time. The approach was basically ‘take this complex thing, break it apart until the parts don’t look intimidating anymore, and then scale up your understanding from there.’

We figured out pretty quickly that some things would have to be done outside of Alaska, at least at first. Those tasks included cutting the blades and extruding the long sticks of aluminum that get machined down into the frames. There aren’t many companies that do that kind of work in the US, and none of them are in Alaska. But we also figured out that we could do all of the machining, assembly, and other tasks locally. That was exciting. Yes, we’d have to bring some items in, but we could actually make skates in Alaska.

Tragically, Brad passed away in 2019 in a vehicle accident. I often wonder what we would have created if we’d been able to continue working together.

How did Ermine eventually get off the ground?

Ermine was formally established in 2021, during the tail end of the Covid pandemic. After years of planning, it looked like a path forward had finally come into view. The blades were done by Cadence, out of Virginia, and we worked with multiple companies in Anchorage on various other tasks, such as machining and coating. Making products is always a team effort.

Ermine Nordic skates drying off

Ermine also quickly scaled up our own in-house manufacturing capacity. One of our first big purchases was a “radius machine,” which grinds a precise curve onto the bottom of skate blades. We imported that machine from Scandinavia, which was incredibly expensive. But the result was that we could put out perfectly-shaped, mechanically-radiused and hand-sharpened blades. We got a lot of feedback that first year along the lines of ‘wow, these are the sharpest blades I’ve ever felt on a Nordic skate.’

The first couple seasons were very chaotic. At one point I was racing around Anchorage buying every poster tube in the city so I could ship skates in them. Sometimes I’d go to pick up a batch of skate frames from a coating company, only to find that that the work hadn’t been done correctly and they’d have to be blasted and re-coated. I wasn’t willing to send skates out the door unless they met a very high standard. Occasionally that meant we’d lose a sale, but the payoff was that we developed a reputation for really beautiful, high-quality production.

Ermine A110 Nordic skates, boxed and ready to go to a retailer

What are the best things about running a manufacturing company? What are the most difficult?

The answer to both of those questions is the same: the people you work with. I’ve for sure had some challenging experiences working with people and companies over the last five seasons. These experiences can be especially discouraging when you’re excited about your product and really personally invested in it. There’s a George Carlin saying, ‘scratch any cynic, and you will find a disappointed idealist.’ Part of your job when you’re running a product-based business is to maintain your optimism, treat issues as practical matters that just need to be solved, and keep moving.

The flip side of this is that working with talented, hardworking, ethical people can be incredibly rewarding. Striving with others to achieve a common goal is one of life’s great joys. Not to get too Carl Sagan about it, but you could argue that this is what people are designed to do: we’re cooperation machines who leverage our communication and intelligence to achieve spectacular things. The skates that Ermine manufactures here in 2026 are the product of many decades of experience, training, failures, and successes by a number of super talented people.

From the outside, it’s easy to think of companies as a collection of physical assets: products, machinery, etc. From the inside, companies look a lot more like networks of relationships. For Ermine, that includes our internal team members but also our retailers, product testers, prominent Nordic skaters, Nordic skating clubs, and much more. The team we’ve built and honed at Ermine at this point [2026] is more valuable than any physical thing that we own.

What about Nordic skates in particular? Are there any challenges manufacturing them?

Nordic skates are superficially simple objects: blade, frame, maybe pins… that’s kinda it. But in reality they’re precision products, and there are a huge number of things that have to be done correctly to make a skate perform properly. Tolerances have to be extremely tight, and there’s little room for error.

Take our skate frames, for instance. It’s one thing to look at a Nordic skate and say ‘oh, that’s an aluminum extrusion, you just call up an extrusion company and have that made.’ Sounds simple, right? But what if the extrusion gets to you (after months of waiting) and it’s slightly bent, or twisted? What if the extrusion die wore a little and now your extrusion has a tiny bump on it that causes an alignment issue with the fixture on the CNC machine? What if the aluminum stuttered while getting pushed through the die and you have a bunch of little perpendicular marks in it? Do you reject it and ship it back? Try to fix it? How will any decision impact your orders and deliveries?

When you make a product you’re constantly dealing with the mismatch between things as they should be and things as they are. And that’s a lot of what you’re paying a product-based business to do: they’re not just assembling a product, they’re managing all of these mismatches in a way that still gives you a super high quality finished good.

I’m not big on giving blanket advice (so much advice is circumstantial!) but one thing I’d say to people starting out with a new product-based business, in this vein, is check everything. Check every number on every proposal. Check them twice. Order samples. Confirm everything in writing. Keep your paperwork in order. Remember that everything will always be a tiny bit wrong. Your job isn’t to eliminate wrongness, it’s to minimize and manage it and keep it in a range where your product is still successful.

Taiga dog on duty in the Ermine workshop

What’s the most fun or enjoyable part of the manufacturing process?

My professional background is in design, and I love designing new products. That process of a product starting out as sketches in your notebook, then becoming a 3D model, then a prototype (then another two dozen prototypes), then a production product, and finally something you see a skater using at an outdoor rink… that’s the best feeling. Part of you always wants to run up to that person and say ‘I made that!’ For the record, I don’t… but the feeling never totally goes away.

What is Ermine’s role in the broader Alaska manufacturing community?

Ermine has added a lot of in-house manufacturing capacity over the years, though we’re still a small company as manufacturing operations go. Everything we do is fine-tuned to manufacturing Nordic skates, so we don’t offer services to other companies. But despite our scale, I think we’re a good example of a local Alaska company with a big footprint and solid national reach. Ermine is proof that we can make things — really, really nice things — in Alaska.