Today we’d like to introduce you to Curtis Fry.
Hi Curtis, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
We (Curtis Fry and Clark “Cheech” Pierce) founded Fly Fish Food as a way to archive and keep track of the recipes for the fly fishing flies we tied. It started as a very simple blog that featured video tutorials with material recipes that enabled fly fishermen to see how to tie their own flies. From that little blog, a demand grew among subscribers to find a way to purchase the materials we featured in the recipes. In 2014, we built a new website with an e-commerce component to go along with the recipes and began selling materials out of my basement. As we added more and more materials to our website and built more video tutorials, we realized there was a lot more demand than we had anticipated. From the basement, we moved into the garage and then, finally, in 2016, we moved into a retail space and opened our first hybrid brick & mortar store with an attached warehouse. Within 18 months, we realized the space was too small and began the search for what has now become our flagship store with over 4000 sq ft of retail floor space, a 3000 sq ft warehouse and a dedicated YouTube filming and podcast studio to boot. We’ve grown from that little basement operation to one of the biggest fly shops in the world as our social media and fly fishing/tying supplies reach a worldwide audience.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The biggest challenge has been positioning our business to properly scale as we’ve added more and more inventory, bringing on more employees and working on expanding our physical store with the warehouse.
As you know, we’re big fans of Fly Fish Food. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
We are a fly fishing and fly tying social media focused company that sells the products that we feature across our channels and the content we deploy. We have one of the largest reaching fly fishing social media channels and ship the products we sell worldwide. In addition, we have a large fly fishing shop located in Orem.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Curtis (me) comes from a background in engineering, working as a commercial aircraft designer at Boeing and working in the business and accounting software world as a consultant for many years before starting Fly Fish Food.
Cheech’s background was in Human Resources working in the area of underground mining specializing in conflict resolution and hiring practices.
Both Cheech and Curtis have also been contracting fly designers to work with different fly manufacturers that distribute their flies worldwide.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.flyfishfood.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/flyfishfood
- Facebook: facebook.com/flyfishfood
- Twitter: twitter.com/flyfishfood
- Youtube: youtube.com/flyfishfood
Image Credits
Curtis Fry
