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Business Profiles
Alpacas make a fashion statement
From Saskatchewan Business Unlimited, September/October 2004. Reprinted with permission.
When the Canadian Natural Fibre Fair took place October 16 and 17 in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan’s burgeoning alpaca industry was well represented. The number of alpaca owners who participate in the fair’s trade show, fashion show, workshops and demonstrations is growing. The appeal could be a growing market for wool that is six times warmer than sheep’s wool, or the prestige of a product that rivals cashmere, or simply working with the animals themselves.
Alpacas are the oldest domesticated animal selectively bred for quality fibre. Their longevity (20 to 25 years) has been attributed to their hardy resistance to disease.
The Gossweilers created Alpaca Expressions to sell high-end products
designed by Hedi, a fashion designer by trade.Alpaca Expressions of Canada, located in Herbert, Saskatchewan, is the largest producer of alpaca products in the province and one of the largest in Canada. Its owners, Max and Hedi Gossweiler, design and produce an extensive line of wearables including sweaters, scarves, socks, hats, and even teddy bears that they market primarily at craft shows and via their website.
As motel owners, they also maintain a well-stocked gift store. “I sold my first sweater to a hunter,” explains Hedi. “His friend came back that night and ordered one for his wife.”
The Gossweilers started their alpaca venture with two females and their offspring. The number quickly grew to form Swiss Line Alpacas (Max and Hedi emigrated from Switzerland in 1981). Although they sell alpacas as breeding stock and pets, the real opportunity for growth is in wool products for the end user. Currently, most products are imported from Peru and Columbia, but the Gossweilers believe there is a market for Canadian-made products because of the country’s reputation for quality.
Alpaca is considered to be a relatively rare specialty fibre. Worldwide approximately 4,000 tons of fibre is produced each year compared to 5,000 tons of cashmere and 8,500 tons of angora rabbit. Of the alpaca fibre produced, less than one per cent comes from North America indicating plenty of opportunity for a thriving cottage industry for this natural fibre resource.
The Gossweilers created Alpaca Expressions to sell high-end products designed by Hedi, a fashion designer by trade. The fibre has a reputation for being as soft as cashmere and as smooth as silk. It has hypo-allergenic qualities because it lacks natural oils. Instead, Alpaca contains a natural resin that protects the wool from aging and getting dirty. It is being marketed along the same lines as cashmere.
With enough interest in their products, the Gossweilers decided to enter the industry in a big way in 1999 by purchasing 272 kilos of fibre from an Alberta producer. Hedi created a variety of products and they developed a display-booth to showcase them at art shows such as Wintergreen and Bazaart.“We had to test the market as we went along,” explains Hedi. “People weren’t sure of the alpaca quality so we have to educate people about alpacas.”
In 2001 they developed a website, attracting clients from as far away as Australia. Socks are their most popular item, although sweaters are their most lucrative item. They are also testing other products such as shoe inserts and dog blankets to determine their interest in the market.
Rodney Weber, president of the Saskatchewan Alpacas Breeders Network (SABN), says that with the number of alpacas in the country on the upswing, there are growing opportunities for people to produce and sell alpaca products. The SABN formed in 1999 to develop the industry in the province.
“The majority of processors produce the yarn on a fee-for-service basis,” he says. “It is then shipped back to the alpaca owner to make it into end-products such as a mitts and socks.”
The industry is currently in the cottage stage because there are simply not enough alpacas for commercial operations. The Gossweilers say that they can only grow their business in increments because there is simply not enough fibre in the country to meet increasing demand.
To help alpaca owners meet the rising demand, the Canadian Camelid Fibre Co-operative (Can Cam) was created. Weber says that as a fibre quality control and grading service, it educates consumers and retailers, and acts as an agent for members to help them through processing and manufacturing.
“There is an opportunity here for people to produce products,” said Weber. “There is an increasing number of animals and increased demand for processing and finished products.”
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Water wonders
On first blush, you wouldn’t think that Saskatchewan, famous for its arid landscape, would be home to innovators in water treatment, but a number of the province’s scientists, engineers and small business owners are leading the way in this vitally important technology.
The recent growth in Saskatchewan’s water treatment industry comes down to a simple case of necessity being the mother of invention. Since Saskatchewan has a limited water supply, many of the water sources available to smaller communities are poor quality, full of various mineral or biological contaminants.
As in much of the rest of North America, people and politicians in Saskatchewan for many years turned a blind eye to the health hazards of poor quality water. The outbreaks of waterborne E.coli in Walkerton, Ontario, and Cryptosporidium in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, quickly took water quality to the top of the public agenda.
The result in Saskatchewan was like finding a pile of dirt swept under the carpet. Local and provincial water officials soon discovered widespread problems with rural and small-town water supplies. Something had to be done.
Getting the bugs out in Yellow Quill
In 1999, Yellow Quill First Nation became something of a symbol, both of the problems with rural Saskatchewan water and of what could be achieved when attention was focused on finding practical solutions.
The community of around 1,000 in east-central Saskatchewan had been under a boil water order since 1995 with no end in sight. The tiny stream that supplied the town’s water was found to be contaminated with sewage that was not properly handled by the town’s outdated treatment facility.
"You could turn the tap on before and you could smell the sewer. That's how bad it was. Our houses smelled like that, sometimes the inside, it smelt like that for days because of the water. Even when we didn't turn the taps on you could still smell it," said Yellow Quill chief Robert Whitehead in an interview for Saskatchewan Sage magazine.
However, Yellow Quill faced a dilemma familiar to many small towns. How do you get city-quality water on a small-town budget? The solutions offered by many engineering firms were simply too expensive.
At this point, the Safe Drinking Water Foundation (SDWF), a Saskatoon-based non-profit research and development agency stepped in. Under the direction of Executive Director Dr. Hans Peterson, SDWF scientists began hunting for solutions that were cost-effective, environmentally friendly and practical.
The first stage involved switching the town’s water source. Instead of the polluted surface water from the creek, the SDWF advised the town to start using an underground well. This, however, brought its own problems. While the surface water was full of sewage-borne bacteria, the groundwater had high levels of organics, iron, manganese, ammonium, as well as high levels of dissolved solids including sulphates.
Peterson conquered this challenge by developing a two-stage treatment process that included both conventional reverse-osmosis membrane filters and an innovative bio-filtration system.
“Chemical approaches to treating this water failed. This is when we turned our attention towards biology rather than chemistry.”
“In nature, bacteria remove iron and other compounds from the water while compounds, such as calcium, are leached from minerals and added to the water. The Yellow Quill Water Treatment Process was designed to copy nature, but while nature takes days, weeks or months to carry out these processes, the water treatment plant at Yellow Quill can do it in half an hour,” said Petersen at SDWF’s International Conference this fall.
Five years and $6.5 million later, Yellow Quill’s new state-of-the-art treatment facility started operation. The boil water advisory that had hung over the town for so many years was finally lifted last March.
Turning reverse osmosis into positive cash flow
While Saskatchewan scientists like Dr. Peterson have developed new approaches to water treatment, entrepreneurs like Murray Brothers have broken ground marketing fresh angles on existing water treatment technology.
Brothers is the president of Central Water Conditioning, a Watson-based company that specializes in small- and large-scale reverse osmosis systems. His company supplied the membrane filtration system that backed up Peterson’s bio-filters in Yellow Quill.
Brothers’s company has been in business in Saskatchewan for over 35 years and has worked on commercial water treatment projects since 1992. Brothers’s entry into the reverse osmosis business is a classic “build a better mousetrap” story.
“We started off supplying small treatment units to small businesses like car washes. We were shipping in and reselling units from the United States. There was always some little thing about the standard units that didn’t quite suit our customers. After about the third one, I started figuring that I could build the things better and cheaper myself.”
Central Water Conditioning became the first and, so far, only company building custom reverse-osmosis systems in Saskatchewan, Brothers says. Custom building the units has given the company a unique advantage in working on projects for small towns hit by water problems.
“When you are upgrading a town’s water system, you are often doing a lot of retrofitting. The town will often have a lot of fittings and secondary systems that would be costly to replace. By tailoring our units to the customer, we can save them some money. We can also fine-tune the controls with the particular controls and valves that the local managers and engineers prefer.”
Brothers’s business has tackled more than a half dozen First Nations projects and numerous small town water systems. They most recently finished installing a new 800-gallon-a-minute facility in Maple Creek.
Although rural water concerns will remain for some time in Saskatchewan as in the rest of the country, the efforts of innovators like Peterson and Brothers will help move Saskatchewan down the road to becoming a leader in water quality.
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Small business profits from Canada's "biggest science project"
by Bev Fast - Article provided courtesy of Access West, a quarterly newsletter by Western Economic Diversification Canada.
When the Canadian Light Source (CLS) project at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S) was first announced in 1999, it generated tremendous excitement…and not just in scientific and research communities.
Saskatchewan’s small business community has benefited from Canada’s biggest science project. To date, more than $138 million in contracts have been awarded for construction and services, and over 65 per cent of this total value has gone to Saskatchewan companies.
The building housing the synchrotron was designed by a team of engineers from the Saskatoon office of UMA Engineering Ltd., along with local architect AODBT as a sub-consultant. Together with the Canadian Light Source Inc., UMA acted as overall project manager for the U of S, a role that is only now winding down.
“The CLS is a fantastic tool for Canada in general, and it’s been an excellent project for us. It has introduced us into the global synchrotron community,” says Barry Hawkins, leader of UMA’s Advanced Research Facilities Group. “We’ve been working in the high energy physics community since 1988 with clients such as TRIUMF [Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics located in Vancouver], but this was our first synchrotron project. Now we’re doing work on the synchrotron being built in Australia, and we’re in talks to do work on other international synchrotron projects. The CLS has opened a number of avenues for us.”
The CLS has also opened doors for smaller suppliers. Startco Engineering Ltd., a Saskatoon-based company that builds custom electrical products and protective relays for a wide variety of industries, was contracted to help resolve the issue of a “clean grounds” for the beamlines.
“Sensitive measurements will be taken, and the U of S/CLS wanted to eliminate interference from systems such as heating, lighting and ventilation. Our product solved the problem,” says Startco Applications Engineer Blair Baldwin.
The company is hoping the experience leads to other work. In the meantime, Baldwin says they got a surprise during a recent tour of the facility. “There was equipment from a large, well-known manufacturer. It contained our ground fault protection equipment. Our product hadn’t been specifically built for the CLS application; it was our standard product that we supply to other companies. It was exciting to see our gear come back to Saskatoon that way.”
Scientific Instrumentation Ltd. is another Saskatoon-based company that has benefited from the project. The company designs and manufactures specialized electronic instruments and equipment for scientific research, industrial and military applications.
“We were involved as part of a technology transfer agreement with the CLS and U of S for a motor control system,” says SIL President Larry Cooper. “We licensed the system from them. It had been developed to a reasonable point, but we took it to a higher level and then supplied it back.”
That’s the nature of technology transfer; it essentially moves technology out of the laboratory into the commercial arena. “Now it has become a product for us. We’re currently in the early stages of marketing it to other synchrotron projects in Australia and Spain,” Cooper says.
Now that the CLS is operational, businesses are discussing potential research partnerships. According to Rob Slinger, CLS chief business development officer, the key is linking synchrotron capabilities with competitive technology companies that have research and development challenges.
“Each beamline has different capabilities. Each workstation functions like an individual, highly specialized lab. It involves different individuals and different types of research. Some of the beamlines conduct highly esoteric, cutting-edge research. Others perform routine sample analysis.”
The CLS is endorsed by 27 Canadian universities and supported by 14 capital funding partners and four operating partners. The Government of Canada, in addition to $85 million in funding for capital construction, recently announced another $19 million in operational funding over the next five years. This includes $16 million from Science and Engineering Research Canada and $3 million from Western Economic Diversification Canada (WD).
For more information about the Canadian Light Source, visit http://www.lightsource.ca/.
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