How do we come up with the novel products we offer to the fly fisher? We get asked that question from time to time. Simple answer - we fly fish…a lot. We’re also inventors, minimalists, and perfectionists with true passion for fly fishing. That combination is what drives our ability to come up with simple, elegant solutions for you, a fellow fly fisher.

So here’s the story of how we came up with the idea for Tippetac. It was January 2013 and we were fishing a local Colorado tailwater (South Platte in Eleven Mile Canyon). It was single digits under blue skies. Fishing was slow as is typical that time of year.  My cold fingers kept dropping the 7x tippet while trying to tie on various tiny midges.  Turns out, all of us were having the same problem.  After doing the fly line retrieval dance a dozen or so times and losing flies, I said “there’s got to be a better way.”  With the heater cranked up on the drive home, we went back and forth on ideas. By the time we pulled in the driveway, we had crafted the idea for this innovative solution. 

What we’ve found through many days of field testing Tippetac, is that this little tool is valuable in any situation, not just fishing tailwaters in winter. There’s also seemingly endless uses. Guides love it for many reasons, but one unique reason is that they get “finger stuck” less often. They put the leader in Tippetac before changing a client’s fly. When the client quickly turns to watch a bald eagle soar by and in turn yanks the line, Tippetac holds the leader steady - no hook in the finger.

The FRS-9 folding rod sleeve was conceived after years of broken rod tips, rods bouncing around our heads while driving a dirt road, and fumbling around with the various solutions others have come up with to transport a fully rigged fly rod. We found the existing solutions cumbersome, expensive or impractical. No one had yet found the holy grail. It’s an issue that every fly fisher has to deal with, so we put our heads together, and bam…simplicity and elegance. Take a fully rigged rod, fold it in half in seconds, store it almost anywhere. And we just realized that we can store our entire quiver of rods on hangers in the closet, ready to fish! No other product allows you to do that. We’re pretty proud that we came up with it, and stoked that we get to use it too.