A Discourse on Trade Tackle

Dr Todd and I decided to combine powers last year on a few fronts, besides the Fishing For History & Angling Echoes magazines, we tapped into our wonder twins powers to activate our internet powers, more specifically, our blog sites. For anyone who has attempted a site, a blog, a forum, be it any shared information on any form of media you will run into a common theme. While we all have myriad detailed reasons why we’ve done them over the years, one common theme you will run into is, for many, its a labor of love. For the hundreds and thousands of hours those of us who have made a commitment over a period of time to share our time and materials or others, inside we really must love what we do. In truth, if not for that being at least partially a factor, really there is no way to justify or that will balance out the incalculable investment of time.

What better way to do than to revisit some classics and send them deep into cyber land, possibly hooking a few collectors along the way. Exposing some of the mountains of content across a variety of social media platforms, to help push our hobby and piscatorial history out to as many people as we can. Last year we spent much of our time laying the foundation and building blocks for the e-magazines, FFH & AE. This coming year one of our goals is to reshare some of the information we ourselves enjoyed and that many others also enjoyed and or participated in and can benefit from.

What better subject to begin with than one of my personal favorites that we never can learn enough about, Trade House Tackle.

This is the primer to what will begin tomorrow and be a 52 week journey. Trade House Tackle Thursday, Over the course of the next year, we’ll be detailing the history of 52 companies that sold branded fishing tackle. 52 trade houses in 52 weeks — some obscure, some famous, and all available exclusively here on the Fin & Flame Fishing for History Blog! If you have any items from the week’s entry you’d like to share with us, please send it my way and I’ll make sure it makes it on the blog.

But, before we begin Dr Todd breaks it down for for us in;

A Discourse on Trade Tackle

The Structure of the Pre-World War II Fishing Tackle Trade

by Dr. Todd E.A. Larson

Nothing confuses people more than trying to figure out which company was a manufacturer, a wholesaler, or a retailer. Hopefully this little discourse will help you to better understand how the fishing tackle you so greatly covet made its way from a factory (or a basement) into the fisherman’s hands.

The structure of selling for the pre-WWII tackle trade (like many others) was approximately as follows:

Manufacturer — Wholesaler — Jobber/Distributor — Retailer.

This little graph begs a few questions. The first is what is the difference between a wholesaler and a jobber? Think of it along distribution lines. A Wholesaler was a BIG company whose buying power allowed it to purchase huge loads of goods (read TACKLE) cheaply from manufacturers. Then the wholesaler would sell at true wholesale prices to a number of other distributors, called Jobbers or Distributors, who then would mark up the goods and sell to a number of retailers in their local region. Thus three people had profited from your fishing tackle before it ever got into a retailer’s hands, who would then profit from the mark up to retail price. In other words, four people sometimes made money from the same piece of tackle. The bigger the retailer (think Target or KMart here) the more likely they could cut out the distributor or even the wholesaler and buy direct from the manufacturer.

Let’s confuse things even more. Some wholesalers sold directly to retailers, cutting out the jobber. Most of these Jobbers advertised themselves as wholesale houses but in reality they were one step removed from wholesaling, as they were distributors. Some jobbers became wholesalers, some wholesaled in one field and distributed in another. Some wholesalers set up distribution networks (think Marshall-Wells Associate Stores here). Large wholesalers controlled the means of manufacturing for many items (think Diamond Manufacturing Company, both an actual manufacturer of items like Keen Kutter axes and a distributor of fishing tackle under the same name).

Let’s not forget that many manufacturers sold directly to the trade; why do you think catalogs were so important in the tackle industry? Far greater profit was made when you ordered from Heddon or Shakespeare than from selling to Shapleigh at wholesale prices, and watching three other people make money from your Kazoo Trolling Bug. Further to confuse things, many manufacturers also acted as distributors–look at early Shakespeare catalogs and find, in horror, Heddon fishing tackle.

How does this affect fishing tackle? Take for example a Montague reel marked Marshall Field Conway. Clearly made directly for Marshall Field and a true “trade reel.” How about a Montague reel marked Rainbow? Defiance? No trade name specific to one company, these reels show up in both wholesaler and distributor catalogs. These “generic” trade reels as they were called, were often bought in huge numbers by wholesalers like Simmons who would then sell them to Jobbers/Distributors throughout their region, which explains why they show up in every one else’s catalogs. Confuse the issue even further, because Montague retained the right to sell these “generic” trade reels directly to the public–a little known fact is that Thos. Chubb was Montague’s retail outlet. So a Defiance reel is both a trade reel and a true Montague reel at the same time!

I would argue true trade tackle is imprinted with a specific trade name, usually a registered trade mark or the name of the firm, of the company for whom they were made. Sometimes this trade tackle was sold to jobber/distributors, but they remain trade tackle only if sold with a unique wholesaler trade name (Bingham’s Uncle Tom, Shapleigh’s Diamond, etc.) and NOT OFFERED for sale under that name by the manufacturer. In other words, a reel marked in such a way that they can be traced back to ONE source. Interestingly, this does not always mean a wholesaler; true trade reels were also made for distributors (Morley-Murphy e.g.) and retailers (Marshall Field, Klein’s Sporting Goods, etc.).

So in my humble opinion here are your categories of trade tackle:

True Trade Tackle (made specifically for one company for retail or distribution and marked with a unique trade name specific to one company)

Generic Trade Tackle (imprinted with a generic name like Defiance intended for wholesale or retail by manufacturer, wholesaler, jobber, and retailer)

Blank Trade Tackle (trade reels made with no identifying mark and purposely left blank to facillitate sale on every level. Sometimes these are found in boxes that identify mftr, wholesaler, distributor, or retailer which would then make them Generic Trade Tackle).

Unique Trade Tackle (made by a manufacturer on contract to commemorate events, advertise something, for fishing clubs, etc. Very rare as they were cost prohibitive.)

The next time you get a piece of marked trade tackle, try and place it within the framework of the pre-World War II structure of the fishing tackle trade!