On the run this morning though couldn’t resist throwing in two cents worth on a topic floating around the fflogs lately.
Barton and Chandler have offered up some pithy commentary over the past few days regarding Redington (part of the Far Bank family including Sage and Rio) opening up a direct portal to customers, sans fly shop.
(She Who Must Be Obeyed happens to be wrapped up in the management end of a prominent national retailer whose niche happens to be small, intimate, boutiquey sorts of stores. The parallel to fly fishing retail, at the least the old, homey neighborhood type of fly fishing emporium, is somewhat uncanny. We chat about the changing world of retail dynamics ad nauseum, and I mean that in the most positive way possible.)
Pardon the alliteration, but three thoughts come to mind this morning…..
Trends and traitors. This ain’t your father’s retail world.
In fact your fly fishing father probably bought the family’s gear from a small local shop with shitty coffee brewing in the back and a snoring black lab sprawled out on the welcome mat. Options may have been limited but the proprietor looked you in the eye, cast with you in the parking lot and thumbtacked your pics up on the braggin’ board.
We agree the true, full service fly shop is going but not gone, most oft replaced by glossy caricatures artfully decorated and staffed by hip but pathetic impersonators.
Even hard working guys mostly doing it right like Angling Trade, ever ready to defend the small shop against the big bad evil box store back in April, haven’t had a word to say about Redington busting out and going direct. Lot’s of folks are listening and silence isn’t alway golden.
Traitorous? Naw. Disingenuous? Sorta hard to argue it’s not.
Tight. Despite what the inside-the-beltway propagandists and certain fly fishing gear manufacturers work hard to have you believe, for most of us with at least one foot planted on terra firma, money’s tight these days.
$800 graphite rods and waders simply ain’t within the realm of reason for folks pinching pennies to put food on the table and gas in the car. Even the more affluent of our fishing compadres are figuring out that thoughtfully chosen $200 rods play just as well as their $800 cousins. Saving a few bucks puts more beer in the cooler (among other perhaps more earnest advantages).
As we’ve confessed before, none of us are trained economists (and sure as hell wouldn’t admit if we were), and the flock of supposed economic experts we read every day aren’t projecting the fiscal picture to get much rosier any time soon with Washington driving the economy over the cliff.
Simms will probably keep hoping you’ll drop close to a grand on rain gear, though we don’t think that will change many rain jackets worn on the river this fall.
Tribes. The freakin’ genius quote of the day comes in from John Arnold, one of the Headhunters maestros in Craig (commenting on the Trout Underground link above) –
We’ve built our business around “community”, just as the Trout Underground, other blogs and fly shop/outfitters have. The question is, do a bunch of shop/blogger/flip-zines make a nation? or just a bunch of tribes? The tribes usually lose.
Tribes very often win local skirmishes, might even dominate the neighborhood, but loose the bigger war. Frustratingly, this principle applies to the conservation war as well.
At least on the conservation end, it’s past time to gather the tribes and build a nation.
As for retail, now that this ball’s rolling it’s probably going to pick up steam and squish a few folks along the way. May not be pretty but it sure as hell be a show to watch.
