Wholesale success

By Daryl Gadbow of Montana Lee Newspapers - 02/26/2005

COLUMBIA FALLS — The former Post Office building is crammed to the ceiling with row upon row of boxes containing a curious assortment of items: Frog hair, centipede legs, tentacles, muskrat hides, moose mane, goose wing feathers, gator hair and something dubiously labeled ‘‘Rub-A-Dub.''

It looks like the ingredients amassed for a monumental witch's potion.

In reality, the array of feathers, hair, fur, skeins of yarn, and various sparkly, multi-hued synthetic materials stacked in the old Columbia Falls Post Office are ingredients for the 1,000-plus fishing fly patterns sold by the Montana Fly Co.

Formed seven years ago by Adam Trina and Duncan Oswald, a pair of former Missoula fly-fishing guides and commercial fly-tiers, the company has grown at an astounding pace to become one of the nation's top three wholesale dealers of flies and fly-tying materials.

A lot of the material in the Montana Fly Co. warehouse is destined for Costa Rica and Thailand, where 125 fly-tiers the Montana company employs produce high-quality flies to exacting specifications.

Those flies, in turn, are shipped back to Columbia Falls, from where Montana Fly Co. distributes them to fly shops and outfitters all over the world.

Both Oswald and Trina guided fly fishermen in the summers and tied flies in the winter to pay for their education in fisheries biology at the University of Montana in Missoula during the late 1980s.

Tying flies commercially, Oswald said, he and Trina discovered they were having a difficult time competing with a glut of inexpensive flies tied overseas.

‘‘We were seeing people default to the cheapest flies, which were not always the most durable or useful,'' Oswald said. ‘‘Adam realized there was a market for durable, dependable, and specialty flies.''

The partners had come up with many highly effective fly patterns for western Montana streams through their own tying experiments.

‘‘We'd try them out with our guide clients,'' Oswald said. ‘‘That was the fun aspect for me, developing a better mouse trap. You can learn so much from that.''

Trina had discussed his business idea with a fellow guide who had been hired to train fly-tiers in Costa Rica for a new fly-tying company. The company had been successful at first, but when the consulting guide left, it failed.

Inspired, Trina put together a business plan and started rounding up customers and investors.

‘‘Within a year,'' Trina said. ‘‘I had completed the necessary research, created a business model, and was ready to make my first trip to Costa Rica in November of 1998.''

The Montana Fly Co. started that year with one small table and four women tying flies.

The company had immediate success, and has grown every year since, Oswald said.

The company still employs some tiers in Costa Rica, but the bulk of its work force and production is now in Thailand. Altogether, Montana Fly Co. has 125 tiers, plus a support staff of about 30 in those countries.

See WHOLESALE, Page D7 In addition, the company has eight employees in Columbia Falls, where all the tying materials are sorted, dyed and packaged, and finished flies distributed to retail outlets.

The largest wholesale fishing fly company in the United States is Umpqua Feather Merchants. In a 2002 trade survey, Montana Fly Co. was vying with two other companies for second place, Oswald said.

‘‘I think we're ahead of one of those now,'' he adds.

Although he knows it's a common perception that workers employed by U.S. companies in ‘‘third-world'' countries are often underpaid, and sometimes work in ‘‘sweathouse'' conditions, Oswald said Montana Fly Co.'s fly-tiers are well treated.

The company's tiers are paid per fly to provide incentive, Oswald said.

As with any business, he added, ‘‘if the workers aren't happy, you're not going to last very long. We offer a great bonus, quarterly, for exceeding expected tying production.''

To ensure quality control, Trina and Oswald take turns spending half of each year in Thailand, supervising the tiers, often providing individual instruction.

The Montana Fly Co. offers more than 1,000 fly patterns, from Adams to zonkers, and from micro-midges to monster ‘‘double-bunny'' pike streamers, each in four or five different sizes.

— Daryl Gadbow writes for the Missoulian.