How it started:
Tony and I have worked several jobs together for the last 15 or so years.
He’s been managing camps, catering, construction and maintenance in the arctic and I have been looking after heavy civil construction, mining operations, blasting, exploration and site service works.
We got along well right away and had a common love for fishing.
When I was working on early versions for survival and ice fishing I would bring them up to site to show
them off. This went on until somewhere over a cup of coffee or two we decided it seemed like a good
idea to give this a go as a business venture.
We tweaked the design over the first year as we started up the business and made our initial sales.
The original model was the small size. Something I had put together for backcountry hiking and for survival kits. It worked very well, but we decided we should make large sizes, mainly to add additional line length and add versatility to be able to use these in more marine environments.
Our outdoorsy friends liked these right away, and our early sales were all by word of mouth. It’s one of those items that when you see them and handle them you really appreciate the simplicity and practicality.
As I mentioned in other writings the big challenge we would face is the North American market. Hand Lining is very popular around the world where more traditional methods of fishing are very much the norm. Here it’s practiced more with the survival and bush-craft communities, not so much the average fisherman.
This leaves our path forward. I guess in our case it’s more of a retro-visionary
concept. How do we get this sport restarted on our continent?
For this we need to go “new school”.
Luckily Tony’s Brother Michael is an IT guy. He has built our website, set up our emails and all of our digital needs , and has linked us with all the background stuff that the world uses now, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. It’s a good thing he’s always there to support all of this.
Our friend Bill, who is in marketing has given us many great ideas on links and hits and the newer methods of promotion, and has also been a great help introducing us to Joe who runs a manufacturing shop to do up our most recent blanks for the product lines.
As Tony and I both work in remote locations for long periods of time we just needed one more person to hold all of this together, so bring in my wonderful wife Tracey.
She’s been the one behind the scenes, both working with Tony and me in my shop manufacturing the products, as well as setting up the meetings, ordering supplies, doing the books, and looking after the social media content. It’s a good thing too as I’m not exactly a “social media butterfly”. In fact if it weren’t for her social skills even my family would likely still think I was on that fishing trip I went on twenty odd years back.
This gets us to today. My merry gang and I looking toward our future and our vision to change the way we fish. We truly believe our motto “Old School New Tool” will become a new phrase at the water near you.
TIGHT LINES
Dave
