Chelsee Pettit, founder of aaniin, with other team members, working in their former office space. Aaniin is entirely Indigenous owned and run, and it aims to boost the Indigenous economy.Supplied by aaniin
Chelsee Pettit came up with the idea to build a national Indigenous-owned clothing brand while walking in downtown Toronto on a Sunday afternoon.
“I thought I saw someone wearing Indigenous syllabics on their shirt and right away I felt this sense of inclusion,” she says.
Even after realizing the graphic was just a triangle, she started brainstorming a design for the shirt she had imagined. Pettit is Anishinaabe and a proud member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation. She wanted to build a brand that would showcase her culture.
By the following week, she had a drop-shipping website up and running for her business and brand, aaniin retail inc. After sales went well in the first week, she decided to temporarily take the site down. “I didn’t want people walking around with Indigenous languages on their shirts if they don’t remember what it says,” Pettit explains.
She updated her designs to include QR codes linked to translations of the designs that featured Indigenous languages and syllabics. It was a way to invite everyone to participate in the reclamation of those languages in an informed way.
“I think that the QR code is the biggest conversation starter for our brand. That’s why I named it aaniin, which means hello in Anishinaabemowin or Ojibwe. Our slogan is ‘every conversation starts with aaniin.’”
Pettit has continued to expand her designs to incorporate other Indigenous languages. The ‘Based in Tkaronto’ collection is aaniin’s best-selling work: the collection uses the Mohawk word ‘Tkaronto, meaning ‘where the trees are standing in the water,’ from which Toronto was derived. The collection invites people to reflect on the history of Indigenous peoples in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), who have called and continue to call this land home.
Aaniin launched as a streetwear brand in 2021, but it has evolved into a department store that stocks the designs and products of dozens of Indigenous entrepreneurs. The brand has more than 20,000 followers on its social media platforms and it has received a lot of support from customers across Turtle Island. Aaniin has had two physical storefronts – one in Toronto’s Stackt market, one at Square One Shopping Centre in Mississauga – though the retailer is now fully online.
As an Indigenous-owned and operated retail store, aaniin focuses on making sure the artists it stocks are profiting from the sales it facilitates. The company’s goal is to expand the Indigenous economy by creating more streams of revenue for Indigenous artists and businesses, increasing their visibility by serving as a centralized platform that customers can use to find and support new and known makers, while also providing entrepreneurs with support and mentorship opportunities.
“I think it’s that level of intention that goes into it aside from thinking about consumerism, sales and capital,” Pettit says about what sets their work apart from traditional department store competitors, keeping the business entrenched in Indigenous values of community and interconnectedness.
Mya Beaudry, founder of Kokom Scrunchies, which started as a fundraiser for youth in her community in 2019.Supplied by Kokom Scrunchies
Kokom Scrunchies has worked with aaniin since the beginning. It’s a family-owned business that originally started as a fundraiser by nine-year-old Mya Beaudry in 2019, with the support of her mother Marcie.
“Chelsee is one of the most uplifting people. She is building her own company but she’s lifting up all these other companies as she’s doing it,” Marcie says.
Aaniin supports Indigenous entrepreneurs by facilitating business development days, hosted in partnership with other companies such as Shopify, Future Printer and Zero. These workshops provide entrepreneurs with educational resources on sales and marketing, giving them the tools to help them grow their respective businesses.
Jessica McKenzie, founder of Future Kokum, standing in the aaniin storefront formerly located at Toronto’s Stackt market, where her work was featured.Supplied by Future Kokum
“We learn to be the best entrepreneurs we can be,” says Jessica McKenzie, artist and founder of Future Kokum, an art and beadwork business. In 2022, McKenzie’s brand was selected by aaniin to be featured at its Stackt market location.
After attending one of aaniin’s business development days, McKenzie was inspired to expand Future Kokum’s scope from selling beadwork to running beading workshops. The brand’s name, which means future grandmother in Cree, captures McKenzie’s mission to share traditional beading techniques with future generations of Indigenous folks – and these workshops are an extension of that goal.
About a year after Pettit started aaniin, she was out walking when she saw someone wearing her triangle design. It was an emotional, full-circle moment from the Sunday afternoon that first inspired her brand and its mission to offer Indigenous peoples better representation of their cultures and languages, which is vital to the work of reconciliation.
“It is really cool to see the evolution of how involved Indigenous peoples are starting to be in Canada. We obviously have decades of work to do, but it’s just really cool to see the beginning of it,” Pettit says.
One in a regular series of stories. To read more, visit our Indigenous Enterprises section. If you have suggestions for future stories, reach out to IE@globeandmail.com