Alaska Wild Gear is a clothing company in Soldotna, Alaska, owned and run by Doug and Rona Hodges, who have lived in Alaska for more than 25 years with their four children. They started the company in 2006 to share the state with locals and with the visitors who come each year, and their motto is "This Ain't the Lower Forty Eight." They sell sweatshirts, hoodies, t-shirts, gifts and souvenirs, and more than 150 styles and colors of Alaska headwear, which they call the largest selection on the Kenai. They design and print their own clothing, sell other brands in the store, and print clothing for other businesses.
We designed and built their custom WordPress ecommerce site, optimized it for load speed, set it up so they could manage products themselves, and built a search engine optimization strategy around their chosen keywords.
The challenge
Alaska Wild Gear's clothing is made for Alaska conditions, and they partnered with Artistic Puppy to capture that in photography. They needed a site that would display those photos and those products in style.
The catalog was the other constraint. They add 40 to 60 new items every year, so the store had to carry a range that keeps growing without the photo-heavy pages slowing down on shoppers.
What we did
We built a custom responsive design with a fully functional ecommerce system, laid out to showcase their products and their photography. We built it on WordPress so the store could scale to whatever size they needed later. Load speed was a priority, so we optimized photo resolutions to keep images crisp and clear on any size of screen without hindering load speeds.
We also set the store up so the team could run it themselves: add products, change stock, remove items, edit items. Alongside the build we put together a search engine optimization strategy around the keywords they chose. They have kept us on retainer to keep their items, their website, and everything else up to date.
The results
In the 12 months from September 1 2025 to August 31 2026, sessions grew 39 percent over the prior 12 months. Online revenue grew 42 percent over the same period. Key events, the actions Google Analytics counts as conversions, grew 35 percent. Organic search sessions grew 10 percent.
The build also reached top three rankings for their chosen keywords and an average page load under four seconds.
