Fishermen, seafood processors, and other agencies from across Bristol Bay traveled to Seattle last month for the 2025 Pacific Marine Expo, the West Coast's largest marine trade show. They were there to talk to experts, buy and sell merchandise, and swap business cards and industry stories.
Among them was Ramie Kraun, a Bristol Bay commercial fisher, illustrator, and founder of “Doe Ramie,” a small business known for its screen-printed apparel featuring original Bristol Bay-inspired designs, based in Naknek and South Naknek.
This year, Kraun hosted her first Doe Ramie booth at the expo. As she told KDLG, it was a place to connect with major maritime brands and promote her work as what she calls a "fishy illustrator." More of Kraun's work can be found on her website.
*This interview is part of a series of voices from the 2025 Pacific Marine Expo.*
Kraun: My name is Ramie Kraun, and I am here at the Pacific Marine Expo selling screen-printed shirts. And my designs are inspired by Bristol Bay.
I grew up, my winters are spent just outside of Seattle here, but I return up to South Naknek every summer for the salmon run. All of my family is from South Naknek, so when I return, it's like a big family reunion. I grew up netting with my mom and my aunties, and now I'm on the family drift boat with my dad and brother.
I just have a background in screen printing, and I love illustration. I feel like some of my early drawings have always been of salmon, seals, or other environmental subjects. So it all just kind of came together here, naturally, just doing screen-printed designs with animals and fishing-related things.
I started it back in, I want to say 2015, and it's always kind of been just word of mouth. I would bring up totes in the summer of my merch, and then I would sell it at the bazaar, Naknek, or off the boat and just around the beach on a four-wheeler.
I always went really well. I feel like the designs can be pretty specific to the area, so when I'm up there, they just sell out every year. And so it's very encouraging having that support up there. And it's just inspired me to do a new design every year since then. I think I only stopped one year, and it was like 2020, like COVID,
Something I noticed, when people leave for the summer, they want to buy things to bring home after the fishing season. And there are only like a few designs you can get at, like LFS, for example. And so I wanted to create something that felt a little more on point with our area, specifically, and not just like fishing in general. One of my early designs was called “Free the Flounders", and the front of the shirt is the top of a flounder, and the back is like the underbelly. And that sold really well. It said South Naknek, because the beach just gets so many flounders. So designs like that are always really fun to sell. Like, really neat, yeah, very niche, yeah.
The Expo has been good. I've met a ton of really cool people, and it's a unique opportunity to connect with big names like Grundens, for example, or Extra Tough, and like, get to, you know, pick the brains of the people in their art departments, or soft good side. And it's just like, I don't know, there are a lot of opportunities here for artists, and I think it would be cool if more people came.
I don't really have a set dream. I just think it'd be cool to get more of my artwork out there in the fishing world and just be more known as like a fishy illustrator person. I just think that would be fun.
