Late last year, Jonas Clark reached out to the owner of Vintage Fly Tackle, an online dealer of ultrafine rods, reels and other fly-fishing equipment coveted by the sport’s most ardent collectors.
For weeks his emails and phone calls to the founder’s widow, Laura Siemer, went unanswered. Clark, 38, sent a handwritten letter in which he described his passion for bamboo rods and English-made Hardy reels. Clark runs the Spinoza Rod Company with his stepfather, Marc Aroner, who has been crafting bamboo rods out of hard-to-find Tonkin cane since the early ’70s.
Siemer eventually responded, and the two started talking shop. Looking at their books was “eye-opening,” recalls Clark, who teaches entrepreneurship at Brown University and has sold consignment fly rods and tackle on the side for a decade. “They were doing as much business as the next five competitors combined, including me. I was like, ‘What? Maybe this is a bigger community than I realized.’ ”
When Clark bought the company’s core assets in March, he acquired documentation for the nearly 10,000 vintage items it had sold, a trove to rival any factory or museum archive. He also gained the company’s email list, cementing his link to a subset of anglers willing to spend four figures on the type of pieces their grandfather’s generation would have used—including the ultimate fly-fishing status symbol, a hand-engineered Bogdan reel. Rare versions have sold for upward of $10,000.
“The field’s a bit—as my students would say—‘pale, male and stale,’ ” Clark says. And yet he’s betting that interest in these wares isn’t going to fade—and that Vintage Fly Tackle’s assets in combination with Spinoza, his other site, will lay the groundwork for a seven-figure business.
The Link LonkOctober 06, 2020 at 07:21PM
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The Fly-Fishing Boom Is Finally Here - The Wall Street Journal
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