About a week ago I received an email from Angling Trade Media. If you’re not familiar with the group, it “is the only independent media group in the world specifically dedicated to covering the business of fly fishing in North America and has been for the past 16 years.  It’s a free subscription, supported by advertisements, and available to anyone associated with retailing, manufacturing, guiding, outfitting, travel, lodges or other sectors of the fly-fishing industry.” The topic of the email was fly shops, titled, “Who Care About Fly Shops” written by the editor, Kirk Deeter.

Kirk has a long history and impressive resume in the fly fishing industry. Kirk was even a guest speaker years ago at the annual Zen hosted event, the Tenkara Winter Series, which took place in Colorado a few years in a row. If you’re wondering about his take on the method, he appreciated tenkara’s simplicity and found some joy and appreciation for it. So, I suppose you could say Kirk was an early advocate for Tenkara. But back to the fly shops. I’m straying.

The gist of the writeup was that manufacturers are doing more and more DTC (direct to consumer) sales and leaving behind the fly shop by offering more sales and special offers. As manufacturers compete with retailers for direct consumer sales, where does the fly shop fit into the industry anymore? What is their purpose and how do they remain relevant in the fly fishing marketplace?

When I read Kirk’s article, I immediately had a head full of thoughts. Partly because, as a manufacturer, Zen is currently advertising a holiday special sale and offering a 30% discount off the entire Zen Tenkara website. I don’t think any of our dealers are offering anything even remotely competitive to this, if any discount at all. When this sale was being developed, we at Zen were concerned about our dealers and the retail shops that carry the Zen brand. We didn’t want to make their life more difficult or undercut their ability to sell during the holidays. At Zen, we have always had a desire to partner and collaborate with retailers. But upon examining numbers and data, a hard decision was made, and that was to move forward with DTC sale discounts that would most likely outprice fly shops who carried our products. We felt a little like traders.

As we discussed this at greater length, the numbers spoke loudly. Retailers weren’t contributing much to our holiday sales and most didn’t carry our entire line. Small replacement or restocking orders were going out, but numbers didn’t show retailers were doing a very good job at moving our products. Not now or in the past. In fact, fly shops have never done a very adequate job of selling tenkara products, connecting with tenkara anglers or even being educated enough to truly speak on the subject in a knowledgeable and professional way. When we walk into a fly shop, we expect to talk to expects or at the very least highly knowledgeable anglers. This wasn’t happening on the subject of tenkara.

To clearly express the magnitude of this issue, Zen has pulled out of fly shops over the past 5 years. We are in fewer fly shops now, than we were in 10 years ago. It is telling when our office receives phone calls from customers or potential customers calling from inside a retail store that carries our products, but phones us because no staff person can answer a tenkara question. This happened a number of times from customers in local, small businesses all the way up to Scheels. This was not good representation. We got choosy with dealers and switched our focus to direct consumer sales.

Back in the day, I’m talking twenty plus years ago, fly shops were unique. Each had their own personality and carried a broad range of products that represented that personality. Each shop had something they excelled at, that they were known for. Because they were often privately owned by an individual, inventory included lesser-known products or brands that the fly shop owner believed in. They were able to buy smaller quantities and hold less inventory and could spread their buying power to products that they really believed suited their customers.

These days, one fly shop pretty much looks exactly like the next. They mostly carry the same products and brands. The big, powerful brands require big expensive minimum orders that suck up shop owners inventory budget. If you want to carry these two rods from this manufacturer, you have to carry their entire line of products. Minimum orders are often massive, and shop staff are pressured to push sales and move inventory in order to make ends meet and keep the lights on. Competition is non-existent if everyone carries the same items at the same price.

This is also why fly fishing shows and expos have a different feel than they did years ago. Retailers would set up booths and offer deep discounts on last year’s models of their own unique inventory. You could stop by one booth at a show to pick up one item on sale and then drop by another to grab something different, at another retailer’s booth. Now, most fly shops don’t set up their booths the same way and those enticing sales aren’t as easy to find at fly fishing shows since so many fly shops carries the same products for the same prices. It often feels as though most fly shops have morphed into a single identity that carry the same stuff and no longer differentiate through products. They are left as Kirk points out, to establish themselves as unique or different only through fly restocking and other services offered such as classes and guiding.

Tenkara gear is simply an example of those “lesser known” products or brands that the typical fly shop no longer has the display room or the product budget to have in their store or offer to customers – those products that are a little less known or provide a little less profit. Tenkara is just another casualty in the big brand fly fishing industry. It played no special role in this retailer transition but rather was simply let out or discarded along with many other products just like in the Christmas classic, Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer, to the Island of Misfit Toys.

Below is Kirk Deeters article from Angling Trade. Please read further and share your thoughts.