Customer Profile: TackleDirect.com

A small bait and tackle shop on the southern New Jersey shore has become one of the largest online fishing stores in the U.S. Here's how they found success.

Patrick Gill, president and CEO of TackleDirect, grew up in the marine industry. “I’m a third-generation marine businessperson,” he says. “My family had a marina on the southern New Jersey shore, and we had a small bait and tackle shop where we sold gear, basic things for boaters and fishermen in the area.”

Fishing Gear on the Web
Gill maintained his interest in marine products even after college. “I started looking at $500 million companies that had catalogs, but awful web sites. In 1997, we decided to build a web site for fishing gear because we already had relationships with distributors and we knew that we could work with those relationships to get the product and ship it.”

After searching for a virtual storefront that would make it easy to start his e-commerce business, Gill chose ViaWeb, an early version of the current Yahoo! Store. “I believe we were one of the first few hundred Yahoo! stores,” he says.

Gill started the business with just a few hundred basic items. Today, the site sells more than 9,000 fishing products. “We work with more than 160 different vendors and only a few of them are warehouse distributors,” Gill says. “Our industry is comprised of a lot of mom-and-pop manufacturers that work out of their garages. We sell rods and reels — and a lot of them. It makes up a majority of our business.”

TackleDirect now encompasses TackleDirect.com and a flagship store in Ocean City, N.J, which was an outgrowth of the Internet business. “We have a well-rounded staff of about 15 people, some part-time, some full-time, some in the retail store — one person that packs boxes, three people on the phone, one customer service person, and some IT folks that handle web site updates and graphics,” Gill says.

Design, Development, and Order Management
“We’ve done all our design in-house,” Gill says. “A local graphics firm, Evolve Studios, does the majority of the work.”

TackleDirect also works with web developer Solid Cactus. “We’ve recently integrated their Cactus Complete Commerce order management system that allows us to aggregate orders from multiple web sites and handle customer relationship management and shipping logistics,” Gill says.

On its web site, TackleDirect refers to its order management system as its virtual warehouse system. “We try to be very accurate with our in-stock quantities and we do our best to ship right up to about 4 p.m. [on the] same business days as long as we have the product here,” Gill says.

Manufacturer Relationships
The TackleDirect team has always placed a high value on its relationships with manufacturers. “When we started out, we made it very clear that we were interested in having a retail store and that we were going to adhere to manufacturer minimum prices and play by the rules,” Gill says.

“Over the course of almost nine years, we’ve become a premier fishing tackle retailer in the country, if not the world, and have developed strong relationships with people that at one time didn’t even want to do business with us. It’s been a struggle.”

New Products and Promotions
The TackleDirect customer database includes approximately 30,000 customers and prospects. “We send out promotions once or twice a month and pass on any manufacturer specials, distributor specials or close-out buys,” Gill says.

“We try to be on the forefront of new product offerings. We put new products up on the site and offer them for pre-order. We’ve offered some exceptional deals over the years.”
           
Gill also leverages his manufacturer co-op dollars to subsidize advertising. “We do full-page ads in a lot of the major fishing magazines,” he says. “We’ve also done some targeted TV commercials.”

In addition, the TackleDirect team uses natural search engine optimization as a critical marketing tool. “We focus a lot of time and energy to make sure we’re doing that with every page on our site. Manufacturer links to our web site have also been very effective.”

A Traditional Industry
“Ours is a very traditional industry,” Gill says. “It hasn’t caught up to the technology. We deal with some large companies that can’t even tell us what’s in inventory. Some can send information electronically, some have to verify it through a manual process.”

It’s also a low-margin industry. “We work with 15 to 30 points in gross margin for our popular items,” Gill says. “That’s tough.”

Perhaps that’s why TackleDirect plans to launch several new stores within the “outdoor” category in the near future under a new corporate umbrella called eCommerce Outdoors. “We’ll be expanding beyond fishing and tackle so that we can leverage many of the relationships we already have to produce higher profits.”

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