Made in Minnesota

Niche gear company Cooke Custom Sewing (CCS) can prompt conversations in unexpected places. This spring, I was floating down Utah’s Green River when another canoeist recognized my distinctive red and black portage pack and paddled over to talk. A few months before, I was hauling a CCS Rucksack on a train in France, and a man in the seat behind me locked eyes onto the pack and asked if I was from Minnesota. You can travel around the globe carrying a pack mass-produced in Asia by one of the more recognizable outdoor brands companies, and nobody will give a rip, but there’s something about the little Midwestern company that prompts connectivity.

Nathan Cooke, owner of the company that produces gear primarily for canoeists, told me that my Rucksack is the one piece of CCS gear that, other than plastic and nylon supplanting brass and leather, is the same pack as when the company started in the late 1970s. Cooke Custom Sewing was founded by his parents, Karen Nelson and Dan Cooke. The couple met while working at Adventurous Christians youth camp off the Gunflint Trail. From the start, they were united by their shared passion for sewing. Karen had been a sewing instructor at Mankato State University, while Dan had learned so he could repair the upholstery on his Cutlass 442. They started Cooke Custom Sewing by repairing portage packs for the youth camp. Dan soon concluded that for the cost of repairing a pack, he could build a new one, so he and Karen began producing new packs for the camp. Friends saw their work and wanted their own, and a ripple effect commenced, demand spreading by word of mouth.

Dan and Karen married and moved to the Twin Cities. CCS would always be a side gig to their regular jobs and raising four children. Karen worked at a fabric store, as a firefighter, and as a ramp coordinator at Minneapolis airport. In addition, she worked 20-25 hours a week at CCS. Dan’s postsecondary education had been at a Baptist seminary, but he began working as a janitor at a manufacturing company. He had a natural aptitude for design and worked his way up, first to maintenance and ultimately to mechanical engineer. An unusual career path. “The unusual part,” Cooke said, “was for his boss to recognize his talent.”

Cooke moved to Kurt Manufacturing as a mechanical engineer and designed a machine that trimmed one-ten-thousandth of an inch off of soda cans, which added up to significant savings for can manufacturers. In addition to his regular job, Dan worked 30 to 35 hours a week on CCS. It was, as Cooke’s close friend Bear Paulsen recalled for the canoeing website Paddle and Portage, “his nightly obsession.”

Nathan Cooke grew up helping with the family business. “My earliest memories are cutting out little bits of webbing and doing what any five- or six-year-old would do with the hot cutter and burning myself,” he said. The bits of webbing were guy attachments for tarps. When he was ten, his mother taught him how to sew seat pads. Cooke Custom Sewing was always run out of the Cooke family home. In the early 90s the family moved to Lino Lakes, to a suburban house on Marshan Lake, which, fittingly for the company line, is on the Rice Creek chain of lakes and a high-water canoe trail. Nathan continues running the company from this location. “Everything in the house but the bathrooms is dedicated to gear,” he quipped.

Some years ago, when I bought my first CCS portage pack, I drove to this house to pick up my order, saving on shipping fees. The garden in front of the house was overgrown, and I remember thinking that Dan Cooke was too busy making packs to cull the ash seedlings that were taking root. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was then a recent widower. I knocked, and Dan Cooke opened the door, providing several packs of different sizes for me to try. It was summer, and we conducted our business on the front step. Through the open front door, I could see tantalizing stacks of inventory in a rainbow of Cordura.

Currently, CCS sells approximately 600 packs and 600 tarps per year, along with a variety of other canoeing accessories, such as thwart bags and stuff sacks, as well as other items like sled bags for winter camping. Polar Explorer Will Steger used a CCS Paris Sled Bag for one of his expeditions and recently commented about Dan Cooke to the Star Tribune, “He was a kind soul and generous, and a genius.”

Dan Cooke was a revered figure among local canoeists for several reasons. For one, typically only experienced paddlers own CCS gear, simply because you have to know about CCS to buy it. It’s not available in stores like REI and Cabela’s, so owning CCS is a bit of a status symbol in terms of one’s experience (price-wise, CCS items are in line with other high-quality packs). The reason knowledgeable canoeists buy CCS gear, however, is that it’s incredibly durable and functional, is tailor-made for paddling northern waters, and is part of the outdoor recreation community. Dan Cooke was a fixture in this community, frequently attending paddling events around the Midwest and offering helpful and humble commentary on pertinent social media pages. He was knowledgeable and approachable. “Expertise is critical thinking about what is going on every time you do a trip, and that was what Dan did,” said how-to canoeing author Cliff Jacobson. The last time I met Cooke was at Bearskin Lodge Resort, on the edge of the Boundary Waters, at just such an event in 2023. When I introduced myself. Dan started to talk but trailed off mid-sentence. Later, I learned he had a brain tumor. He passed away in early July 2024.

Karen Cooke had died in 2018 of ovarian cancer. After her and Dan’s children were grown, their three daughters having moved out of state, Karen had not gone on the extended canoe trips to the far north that Dan had begun taking. She was, however, “always outdoors,” Nathan said, frequently canoeing and skiing. In 2012, Nathan, his mother, and sister backpacked the 93-mile Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier in Washington state.

During his later years, Dan Cooke got into far north canoeing through Bear Paulsen, a fellow paddler whom he’d met at an adventure symposium where Paulsen presented on a four-and-a-half-month solo paddle trip he’d taken in Canada. Later, Paulsen, like many avid canoeists, had come into Cooke’s home factory to get a custom-made spray skirt for his canoe. Paulsen also started working for Bell Canoe and came to know Cooke professionally through the equipment CCS sewn for Bell.

“Every summer I disappeared on a two-to-four-week canoe trip in Canada,” Bear recently wrote in Paddle and Portage. “I always shared my plans with Dan, but he never expressed interest in going. His work ethic and belief that CCS would fall apart without him meant he wouldn’t take long trips.” In 2015, however, Bear brought his new collapsible Pakboat canoe to Dan for a spray skirt fitting. Paulsen and his fiancée were soon to leave for the Kazan River in far northern Canada, and Cooke surprised him by saying that he wanted to come with. Cooke joined Paulsen on the first of several long canoe journeys.

For Nathan Cooke growing up, the family was so busy with work that Nathan’s canoeing with his father was limited to an annual Memorial Day weekend Boundary Waters jaunt. In hindsight, Nathan is surprised they were able to make the trip at all, considering how busy that time of year is for the company. Dan was “working 80-hour weeks and trying not to fall behind,” Nathan recalled. For him, the summer paddling season is too hectic to go anywhere, so he makes his annual Boundary Waters pilgrimage in October.

Currently, everything CCS sells is sewn by Nathan Cooke and two veteran seamstresses who have been working for the company for more than twenty years. Nathan works from the house on Marshan Lake, and the women work out of their own homes, also in the Twin Cities. The company is rounded out by Sherrill McFerran, chief operations officer. “I just call her my boss,” Nathan said.

Nathan Cooke had gone to school for wooden boat building, “I thought I’d be a woodworker.” He worked as a framing and finish carpenter in a lumber mill and, most recently, built sets for Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater. With his father’s illness, though, he stepped in and took over the family company. Cooke Custom Sewing is busier than ever, and Nathan is in it for the long haul. His goals for the future? “Continue the growth, continue owning it, and I’m hoping to expand to an actual brick and mortar outside of the family home.”