Flying High

COLUMBIA FALLS, Mont. — 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, multihued 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.

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.

“Last year,” Oswald said, “we had 150 new patterns. And we’re always adding more.”

Many of the company’s patterns were designed by top fly-tiers from western Montana, and around the country, as well as by Oswald and Trina. The tiers are paid a commission on sales of their patterns.

One of the Montana Fly Co.’s most effective marketing strategies is producing custom fly patterns to match the hatch or method of fishing in a particular region or country.

The Montana Fly Co. can provide whatever a particular fly shop wants, he added.

“It’s something we’re willing to do,” Oswald said. “Everything has an exact recipe. We can change part of the recipe to fit different customer needs.”

An important part of the business, and one of the main challenges facing the Montana Fly Co., Oswald said, is being able to send large quantities of materials to the fly-tiers, and getting finished flies back in a timely fashion to fill orders.

To do that, he said, the company has to “jump through a lot of hoops,” including customs inspections for both countries. Feathers and other natural animal parts are strictly regulated because of international concerns about diseases and poaching.

“A lot of people think you’re a short-order cook,” Oswald said. “I think people, to this day, think I’m sitting here tying flies, when it’s all done in a factory to fill an item order that may be 1,000-dozen of a particular fly.”

The company’s oldest customers, the Missoula fly shops, are some of its biggest fans.

Matt Potter, co-owner of Missoula’s Kingfisher Fly Shop, was Oswald’s roommate for several years when they were both guiding.

Kingfisher still does most of its business with Umpqua, Potter said.

“We buy probably a third of our flies from those guys (Montana Fly Co.),” he said. “And every year it’s a larger percentage. They do a very good job with Montana flies. They’ve addressed this niche of the market better than some of their larger competitors.”

George Kesel, owner of Kesel’s Four Rivers Fly Shop in Missoula, echoes those sentiments.

“Their fly quality is excellent and I sell quite a few of them,” Kesel said. “They have what I need. With their founders having guided around here, they have a lot of flies I need for this area. They’re more important to me than Umpqua. When it comes to tying flies, I believe the Montana Fly Co. is up there with any company you can name.”

The only drawback to having their company grow so fast, Oswald and Trina said, is that they don’t have much time to go fishing themselves, let alone tie flies anymore.

“I do a little tying at home, just to relax,” Oswald said.

Their rapid growth has been a surprise, Trina added.

“I never had any doubts that it would be anything but successful,” Trina said. “I knew we had the best product, with the most innovation, and that, combined with a lot of hard work, a little luck and perseverance, how can you go wrong?”