S1, Ep 26: Kristen Mustad of Nautilus Reels

Kristen Mustad of Nautilus Reels

Episode Focus: Kristen discusses the origins of Nautilus Reels, his passion to build the best reels on the planet and the importance of giving back to the sport.

Marvin Cash (00:04-00:11): Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly, and on this episode we're joined by Kristen Mustad of Nautilus Reels. How's it going, Kristen?

Kristen Mustad (00:12-00:13): How are you, Marvin? Thanks for having me.

Marvin Cash (00:14-00:38): I'm just trying to stay out of trouble. Before we get rolling today, I want to give a shout out to this episode's sponsor, the First Fly Shop in Bryson City, North Carolina, Tuckasegee Fly Shop. They also have a location in Silva, and you should stop by and see Dale, Bobby, and the shop dogs and the rest of the crew for all of your needs in that part of Western North Carolina. So Kristen, I start all of my interviews out by asking my interviewee to share their earliest fishing memory.

Kristen Mustad (00:39-01:20): Looking back, it was probably up in the mountains of Norway. That's where I'm from. Man, mid early to mid seventies, trolling a fiberglass, yellow fiberglass rod of some British manufacturer with a sinking line behind the rowboat on a lake in the mountains. So that was my first, quote unquote fly fishing experience. So that wasn't much casting involved, but we trolled the fly rods around because dad and uncles were all throwing flies. So we have to do the same.

Marvin Cash (01:21-01:31): Absolutely. And so that was all your first experience and it was your first fly fishing experience. And I know you live in Miami, Florida. When did you get the saltwater fly fishing bug?

Kristen Mustad (01:32-02:07): I probably in the late eighties, I think just coming out of college. I went to visit one of my school buddies in Venezuela and I went to Los Roques and brought all my quasi saltwater gear out there. And I remember there were pretty big learning curves on switching to saltwater. So that must've been like in '89. And Los Roques for bonefish, I think I went home with one fish, which isn't all that stellar. In those days, I probably should've caught like 30.

Marvin Cash (02:08-02:16): No, I understand. I tell you, it is a completely different game. I've done the bonefishing thing a few times and just about the time I think I've got it figured out, it's time to go home.

Kristen Mustad (02:17-02:40): That's right but the advantage of saltwater really is that you can be bonefishing but if you catch a puffer fish or a box fish they'll still outrun any freshwater fish in two strokes of the tail. So I mean it's still a lot of fun for the first timer who doesn't care what he catches. It's really really great.

Marvin Cash (02:40-02:46): That's outstanding. And who are some of your mentors as you started on your fly fishing journey?

Kristen Mustad (02:46-03:50): I'd say it was mostly family because I lived in Europe till I was 18 or 19 when I came to college here. And really there were four TV channels that we watched and they were state-run channels and there wasn't much to see. There were some comics I remember as a child on Saturday nights from seven to eight and that was it.

But there weren't really any TV shows or stuff like that. And I had like these uncles, pseudo uncles, that came over to Norway during the war and my grandma took them in. And so there were all these Hungarians that loved to go fish and they were - I mean these guys were big catching killers. So it was a lot of fun hanging out with those guys just catching stuff and eating stuff.

So I really, my mentors were inside my family. And I think I didn't really look at a mentor until I started doing the saltwater things. And then of course Walker Cay Chronicles comes on TV and that's the end of it.

Marvin Cash (03:50-04:15): Yeah no that was a great show, absolutely. And what was it like - I mean obviously maybe some of our listeners don't know but I mean you really have a rich family tradition. I mean your family's the Mustad in Mustad hooks. What was that like? You talk about "oh I fished with my family" but that's got to be a pretty cool experience. I mean because your family was at ground zero for so many things fishing.

Kristen Mustad (04:15-05:24): Yeah, I mean I know that in my early days, earlier than I can remember, I know we fished some of the salmon rivers in Norway. But the kids were sent to the puddles so we never caught much. Little trout and stuff that were in the back eddies. The salmon were for the older people, and that's what they did.

But it was cool growing up. I lost my grandfather, who was the president of the hook company, when I was three. And actually, I still have a couple of memories of him. And everybody tells me he was the greatest guy, the nicest guy, and I sort of regret not being able to fish with him.

But when he passed away, they split up that whole company and cousins took the fish hook and the other guy took the nails and the other guy took some properties. So it was split up into multiple groups. But I grew up my whole life sort of wanting to do something in the fishing world. Yeah. And that's the background, right?

Marvin Cash (05:24-05:40): Yeah, and I know that Nautilus Reels is at least your second career because if I remember correctly, you were doing tech consulting in the early 2000s when you had the opportunity to acquire the company that became the platform for Nautilus. How did that all come about?

Kristen Mustad (05:41-08:19): Well, yeah, I studied tropical agriculture, and I worked in agriculture until I got really sick of it. Because every time I wanted to - I'd tell the boss, hey, man, I'm good in the field. I want to go in the office and figure out how this company's run. And I would just get a raise every time. And it was like, hey, man, I don't want to be in the field the whole time. I've been doing this for five years now. I want to start figuring it out.

And the guy that owned the sugarcane plantation I was on, he said, hey, man, I've got a cell phone company. Why don't you go do a program there where you spend three months in every department? And I did that for two years before I went to do a master's degree.

And after my master's, I moved to Miami to do his dot-com thing that blew up within months of arriving here. And then I set up my own little technology consulting firm, helping Scandinavian technology companies come to first Latin America and then the U.S. and Latin America. And then I got a partner in that sort of stalled everything, and I sold out to him. But I had to serve out my time there.

And the last week working for him, I opened up the Miami Herald and the fishing section that I never knew existed. There was an article on a fly reel company here in South Florida called Old Florida Fly Reels. And I read it and I was like, man, they had a bad day on the water because apparently this guy had taken Susan Cocking, who was the reporter for the outdoor section, taking her fishing. And I guess they didn't have a good day, but he sounded like he was tired.

So I called them up and I said, hey, man, let's meet up. Actually, I sent them an email and I got an email back within 10 minutes and showed up. And that must have been sometime in November. And by May, we'd done the transaction and I partnered with this guy. And a year later, I completely bought him out.

But we got into it and figured out real quick that if we didn't change things up very, very fast, we were going to go broke. So the question was, hey, do we have it in us to change everything real fast, or should we just shut it down before we even start this game?

And so it started, I think it was May 23rd in 2003. And in September in Denver, we introduced the Nautilus CCF 8, 8, 10, and 12. So it was a quick one. And at that show, we landed Kauffman Streamborn, which was arguably the biggest fly shop in the world at that time. And so that was a big coup for us.

Marvin Cash (08:20-08:35): Very cool. And I know you mentioned that your undergraduate degree was in a botany-related field. And I know you got an MBA, but where did the manufacturing expertise come from that made you comfortable to do what you're doing now with Nautilus Reels and make that jump?

Kristen Mustad (08:36-10:08): At Nautilus Reels, I'd never done any manufacturing. I always liked to tinker with stuff and build stuff. I always been mechanically inclined and I was curious about it. I mean, I couldn't take apart - I couldn't fix a motorbike if I had to. But I can build stuff and it came pretty easy to design things.

I mean, I had set in my mind what I wanted the perfect saltwater reel to be. And I think that the biggest challenge was figuring out how to make a removable spool and a drawbar type reel. So if you look at like Abel or Tibor or Seamaster or Fin-Nor, wedding cake, they're all drawbars, which means there's a bar that goes through the spool to the back of the frame and you tighten it and it pulls the spool towards, it draws the spool towards the frame and there's a cork that's exposed against the back of that spool. That's drawbar.

And the problem is that you've got that nail coming through there. And when I looked at it I said oh man that's how we're going to do it. So I just almost cut out the core of the spool where the bearings were and just put a threaded cap on the top of it. And I just put like a spool that was indeed it was just a capsule on onto the whole mechanism and then we close it up from the back.

But the mechanics of this industry I'm still learning and it's a lot of fun. And every time we start a new reel, we discover new things that we can do.

Marvin Cash (10:09-10:16): So that's very cool. And how did your family history kind of flow into your approach at Nautilus Reels?

Kristen Mustad (10:16-11:47): Well, it's always the whole family has always been about manufacturing. Being brought up in manufacturing. So we were never allowed to work for any of the family companies. That was like a big no-no. You have to go out in the street and learn your trade and fail on other people's dollar. And so we just watched from sidelines what was going on. And dad would talk to us about business and making this and making that and opening a factory here and closing another one there. So it was always there, but it was never hands-on for us.

I remember my first summer job, I was at a trout farm. It was actually a salmon farm, landlocked salmon farm in Sweden and it was terrible. I mean, we flipped over a forklift. It was me and my cousin. We went to work there, flipped over a forklift. We dumped a tank full of fry that we had to get from the inside tanks to the outside nets. And it was just a nightmare.

And that was not manufacturing per se. It was just hard work, but it was sort of, hey, as close as I could get to the family business without stepping into it. It was fishing and it was fish and it was fun. But I don't know, the whole family, the flow into it is pretty much a history thing where you've got this tradition. People talk about it, but never a hands-on deal, right? It's always an aspiration.

Marvin Cash (11:49-12:02): Very cool. And to kind of back up to the beginning of Nautilus Reels, what did the landscape look like? And what was it that you saw as the opportunity in the reel space and fly fishing that you wanted to seize on when you bought the company?

Kristen Mustad (12:03-12:21): Well, when I looked at it, I said, oh, man, I can already picture that Nautilus private jet with the Nautilus paint on it and all that. And that was so cool because it was going to be so huge and so big. And this industry is ripe for the taking. And then I got to work. That's pretty much how it was.

Marvin Cash (12:23-12:25): Outstanding. So it was all about getting a G6, right?

Kristen Mustad (12:26-12:28): It was all about it, man. All about it.

Marvin Cash (12:29-12:41): So kind of stepping back from that, what was your vision for the brand? I mean, what did you want Nautilus? What did you want and what do you want Nautilus Reels to stand for in the industry?

Kristen Mustad (12:41-14:37): Well, I'll tell you, I've been contemplating a lot about one is the manufacturing side of things. And the other is all the other stuff we do, the causes we support and all that. And I'm trying to find out - I'm trying to roll into our purpose, the whole conservation aspect of things.

But really, I always fall back to why I started this, which is your question, which is I wanted to make the best fly reel out there. And that's really why we keep innovating, because we make a reel. And like, take, for example, the FWX. So we came out with the FW first. People love the reel. Then we did the FWX, which they liked even better.

And then we were so backed up with shipping. I said, man, we need to figure out a way to do this faster, make them faster at this price point. What can we do? And so I had the price point in mind and went to the drawing board and came up with the X reel.

And I remember one guy telling me, he goes, hey, man, this reel, why don't you just call it the NV and make it the new NV? Because I think it's awesome. And I said, because I designed it for that price point. It's better than anything out there, I think. It's everything in it, as downsized as you can be, and it's built as economically as it can be, but we don't skimp on the critical parts.

The one-way clutches are still these hardcore Japanese ones. The seals are still manufactured for us on these tiny little Swiss machines out of a super duper solution or a super duper compound. And that's most expensive for most other companies to do but we cut costs on machining on the finishing parts of it. We just try to optimize the whole process so we can spend the money where it needs to be spent.

Marvin Cash (14:37-14:52): Yeah I know it's interesting because I know kind of doing research for this interview that you've been, you do direct, you don't have middlemen, so you don't have that cost in your system. And you've really worked hard on just-in-time delivery, which I think is really interesting.

Kristen Mustad (14:52-17:15): Yeah. So the whole just-in-time delivery part is forced upon us. I wish I could have inventory on the shelves, but I don't. And it's sort of, okay, hey, let's - we could get another 10 machines here, double production. And I say, man, let's double the employees, double the headaches, double the maintenance on the machine, double the costs. I'm never going to make any money at this.

Right now I'm comfortable and we're growing at a good rate. But we've had 10 machines here for four years and we still continue to grow because our output keeps growing. And the beauty of that is we're getting smarter about manufacturing these things. I mean an FWX - in the time it took me to put together an FWX I can put together three X reels.

What does that say? It's like hey man we should charge less for them? No, I can put together three X reels with much better components than I had in the X components that I didn't have back then, components I couldn't afford back then. And we've got our eye on everything out there.

I mean I go to SHOT Show, which is the firearms industry, because they've got circular parts and they do cool machining. And I look at all that stuff. I go to expos. I mean, we've got some plastics we use in our reels that are incredible and they're not cheap. They cost more than having a bearing, but we've got bushings from the food industry. I mean, who would think of that?

And it's just, we keep looking for what we can use. We played with a coating that didn't work out. But we played for four years before we made a firm decision, hey, man, it's not going to happen. And we worked with a coating manufacturer to essentially find out that, hey, man, this is not going to work for us.

Yet the military uses it on everything they do. And lo and behold, there's a competing reel manufacturer that comes out with it. And, hey, we know he's going to fail miserably. And it's sort of sad to see, but at the same time, hey, we've been playing with it four years and made the decision we're not going to launch it because it's not there. You thought you had the best idea ever, you launch it and it's going to bite you.

Marvin Cash (17:17-17:28): Yeah, no, doing the legwork and the background preparation is always a big, big deal. In terms of who do you target your reels for in the fly fishing community?

Kristen Mustad (17:30-19:55): I always say, one of the things I always have talks about with fly shops is everybody was chasing the millionaire. For the last 15 years or 20 years, the fly shops have been chasing the millionaire. And that's really, really bad. The baby boomers are getting old and they're not getting out there anymore. And they skipped the generation. We weren't catering to the children of those guys.

Yeah, I'm one of the kids from the baby boomers, right? But not many of us are out there. And the guys that we try to build them for is the coming generation. Granted, the older generation, the baby boomers are loving our reels because of how light they are and they're discovering it. And it's really an eye opener for them because they can cast their 10-weight now when it was getting too heavy for them.

And now suddenly with a lighter reel, everything seems to play out better. They can cast 12-weights now. They don't have shoulder aches anymore after a day of fishing. And that's all because a lot of our reels weigh half of what a competitor's reels weigh.

So who's my target today? I take care of those guys. They pay a lot of my bills. But I have a strong belief in the younger generations, the millennials. They are not afraid to spend money. They're walking around with $1,000 iPhones and Androids, and they always have the latest of everything.

And when I see these kids, they can be your Brooks Brothers kid. They can be a skateboarder. They can be a dirt biker, a surfer. It's become cool to fly fish again. And these guys that are out there riding waves or running tracks or hiking in the mountains or going hunting - they're also fly fishing.

The general fishing population is looking at fly fishing as a cool thing to do. And it's almost like looking at golf. Golf used to be the snob sport. And suddenly the average blue collar guy could go play golf. And they did.

And you're looking at these guys. I mean, God almighty, 20 years ago, you ask one of the target fly shop clients, hey man, do you think this guy that looks like a biker has got tattoos all over his body would be a target fly fisherman? They would have laughed in your face. Well, guess what? They are.

Marvin Cash (19:56-19:56): Yeah.

Kristen Mustad (19:57-20:46): They are a big part of our community now. They're the guys that people look up to. They're the guys tying all the radical flies. They're the guys pushing the boundaries. And granted, they're not going to get in a private jet and fly off to Midway to go fish for GTs. No.

But these guys are jumping fences. They're saving money. They're doing these trips here and there. They're exploring boundaries. They're fishing. I mean, look, carp. We're fishing for carp now. Nobody would have thought about that but it's a fun sport and it's hard. It's a challenge. Guess who's doing it? All these kids. And the older populations following them. Look at all the fly fishing movies. I mean who's watching these? It's the millennials. They love it. That's my target audience.

Marvin Cash (20:46-21:02): That's very cool. Yeah it's amazing. I mean looking at that, I think a lot of that is tied to the improvements in manufacturing so that you can chase other species. And also there've been some advantages for cost savings to get some of the tackle costs down has really kind of helped people chase all kinds of stuff on the fly now.

Kristen Mustad (21:02-21:56): Yeah, I agree with that. I think Temple Fork sort of led the way on the low dollar fly rod. And I think it opened it up to a lot of people, but I'll tell you what, these millennials, when they go out to buy a reel, if they want a Nautilus reel, they're looking at the NV. And if they can afford the CCFX2, that's what they're going to buy. They're not going to get the X. They want to go as high as they can.

And the minute they've got room on a credit card to buy an NV, they're going to dump that CCFX2 and jump on the NV because they want the top dog. And that's why they have those expensive phones. They're not afraid to spend the money and they're not spending dad's money.

These kids are doing business. You've got 14-year-olds buying and selling stuff all day long. In our day, we didn't do that. It was the odd man out that did that. This generation, I mean, these guys are hustlers. They're working every day.

Marvin Cash (21:56-21:59): Yeah, I had a paper route and I cut grass. That was what I did.

Kristen Mustad (22:00-22:01): Yeah, exactly. These kids, they would never do that.

Marvin Cash (22:03-22:12): Yeah, I know. I have those discussions with my boys too. So can you share the story behind your motto of tested on animals, how that came about?

Kristen Mustad (22:12-24:34): So a good friend of mine used to be married to another friend of mine - that's how we became friends. He out of New York City, his name is Chris Route, he's got - he has a little marketing company that he runs. A little, I say little because he's the brains behind it but it's not little. But anyway he runs this marketing company and he likes to fly fish and we fish together.

And I call him up one day and we're talking business. He's all excited that I'm doing this thing and I mean it was years and years ago. I don't remember when it was that we got the trademark for this but he came out - he said man why don't you say tested on animals?

We're sort of looking for a slogan and I talked to him about it and he called me up. He said man why don't you do tested on animals? And I said dude that is way hardcore we can't do that. And so that thing just got discarded.

And I don't know if it was six months or a year later we said you know what? Screw it, let's run with tested on animals. Like yeah cool, cool, okay. But who came up with that? Can you remember who came up with that? It's like no because we called every friend of ours. So we're like man we can't remember who came up with that thing. Well let's try to trademark it and we'll run with it.

So we started a whole tested on animals deal. I asked a designer buddy to come up with a stamp because I wanted to stamp like almost like the cargo container. I was thinking of Men at Work, that's the record back then because it wasn't even a CD that had this - it was called Cargo and there was a wooden box on a beach and there was a big stamp on the side that said Cargo. And that's how I wanted it to be, just like a stamp tested on animals, like a washed out thing.

And that's what he came up with. And that's really that tested on animals slogan and logo. The trademark got approved. I couldn't believe that it got approved, but it got approved. I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

And what amazes me today is that after so many years, and it must be more than 10 years, maybe 12, even that this thing got launched, people are still discovering it. I'm like, man, that's how underexposed everything is in this market. Maybe I'm not marketing it well enough, but at the same time, I haven't had any complaints from PETA. So I'm happy.

Marvin Cash (24:36-24:46): There you go. In the early days of Nautilus Reels, can you share some of your biggest or most unexpected challenges as you took the reins in the early 2000s?

Kristen Mustad (24:49-26:54): Man, it was - the previous owner had burned so many bridges. I remember making my first sales calls and just people just shutting me down everywhere. I thought we had 100 accounts and we had three. So I think that was the biggest challenge for us was, hey, man, let's not lose spirit here and let's just keep plowing forward and try to work this out.

And it did. We hired our first sales rep probably in 2004 or 2005, so a year in. And that was in the Northeast, a man by the name of Don Brown. And everything started going uphill from there very, very slowly, very slowly.

I mean, I always say, if you're going to start a business, I tell all my friends and all the younger guys that ask me about starting a business, I say, think about it real hard. It's not going to be easy. It's a lot of fun, but it's a real challenge. And if you're not - if you can't handle pressure, you're not ready to be an entrepreneur.

Because it's going to take five times the amount of cash you thought it would. And five times the amount of time you thought it would before you start actually working it out. If you do. And you are the company, right? So there's - you're always on, you're always on at all times.

I mean, nowadays I sort of - well, I always say I stop, but at 6 p.m. I stop checking emails, which I never do. I check them all the time. I hold off on answering them until the next day, usually just because I want to have a little bit of family time.

But I mean, the first eight years, it was nonstop. It's 24-7 work. You come home on Friday and on Monday there's payroll and there's no money in the bank. And between Friday and Monday morning, there's nothing you can do but hope for the best. And Monday morning shows up and you hustle and you make payroll.

And that's the way it is, but you've got to be able to sleep rested off. And that takes a different stomach. Not everyone's cut out to be an entrepreneur.

Marvin Cash (26:56-27:08): Absolutely. And I know you wanted when you started Nautilus to build the best reels in the space. Can you share with my listeners kind of what distinguishes your reels from other reels that are in the fly fishing space?

Kristen Mustad (27:08-29:53): We had an ad that ran and we're actually going to put up a link on our website with all our past ads. I'm working on it now. And the ad ran, it said, we start with this and there's a photograph of pure bar stock. And then underneath is a picture of our reel and it says our competitors start with this. And that's pretty much where we're at.

I think we're at the forefront of reel technology and everybody else is catching on. I mean I remember one of the big boys saying there's no such thing as a sealed reel. I mean I don't know anybody that's trying to push something that's not sealed these days, whether they are or - and like the red brake, I always wanted to have the Brembo brakes of fly fishing. And that's why we painted the back of the brake pad on the NVs or the CCFs red and it stood out.

I don't think you can find a reel that's not available with a red drag these days. They all started doing them. So people are following. I think from a standpoint of - we didn't start using carbon fiber. Other people were using it before us but we made it mainstream. We made carbon fiber acceptable in the big game market because it really wasn't. Other than Charlton reels, nobody was using carbon fiber for big game fishing.

And that's why we came out with the CCFX. This is a CCF drag which is a carbon fiber drag. And it was hey, we can't just make a carbon fiber reel or carbon fiber drag. We need to have cork in there because every big game fly fisherman uses cork because that's what you need.

And cork was used in the 50s in the automotive industry and it was supplanted by carbon fiber. And here we are still using it in the 90s, in the 2000s in fly fishing reels as a brake surface. And it was using the clutches and it's like hey guys let's move on.

Other people are using it but nobody's accepted it. So we said hey let's put a sliver of cork and say there's cork in there. And yes it serves a purpose - it dampens vibrations, it doesn't transfer the heat that's generated which is an important part. But I could do that with a resin, the glue that bakes all the parts together does that for me as well.

So we put it in there because we wanted to convince the guy, hey man, it's got cork. It should be okay. Try something new. Now everybody's pretty much using it. Everybody that wants to spend the money on it. Cause it's not cheap.

Marvin Cash (29:54-30:04): Got it. And talk a little bit about your design philosophy and process and kind of how you iterate your reel designs.

Kristen Mustad (30:05-33:48): So it usually starts - when I started this, I said, okay, people are buying a new car every three to five years that costs 20 to 30,000 bucks on average. Right. If you look around yourself and you say, okay, how often do people buy a fly reel? They didn't. It was one or two in a lifetime per line weight or whatever, per size of rod really. Right. So you had a carp reel and maybe a couple of saltwater reels. But you have those for life, and they last a lifetime.

So we said, man, people are swapping cars every five years. Let's make people swap reels every five years. So we decided that we were going to launch a new product every year. And new product meant it could be a new size or a new line.

So we started with a CCF, which was targeted at the mid-price range in the big game, $400 range. And it's still in the $400 range 16 years later, to get the masses on it. Then we came out with a higher end, and then we came out with a lower end, which was the three lines that we still have. Nowadays, it's the X, the CCFX2, and the NV.

But it's always about, hey, how old is the NV? How old is the CCF? Can we add another one? Where do we go from here? And if the decision is made to bring in a new reel, whether it's a new size or what, if it's a new size, it's real simple because you can just say, okay, man, let's move this up to five inch, test it out and see if that works.

And lo and behold, it did work. We never thought it would work on a four and a half inch because our CCF system, because we thought we'd get a lot of torque on it, but it worked out fine.

But then if you come up with a whole new line, it's like I told everybody, the reels, we try to keep them similar in design. So we don't lose that look. Okay. On this, in the case of the X, I wanted to change the look. I wanted to bring in a new design and it's working for us.

But it still has a lot from the FWX and the screw cap on the spool is the same exact size as the one of the FWX. The cover on the brake is identical to the one on the FWX, but everything inside is totally new.

So when we start with a new reel, we really build it from scratch. It's not just a cosmetic, oh, look at this. I mean, there are reel companies out there that have had the same brakes, the same internals for the last 25 years, and they're coming out with new spool design, new frame design. What good does that do you, right? You're not taking advantage of the new technology.

So I mean, typically the process starts with me scribbling at my desk or somebody like Jesus coming in and saying, hey, Kristen, man, what if we did this? And I usually just shut him down because we've tried all that before. But he's been around long enough that he knows when he's going to get shut down and when not.

But we'll sit down, look at it. And then I start drawing and I scribble it out by hand, usually to size. And then I hand it over to Jesus and he puts it in CAD and then we go out to the manufacturing floor. And typically by the time we're done with the reel, we know if it's going to work or not.

And we'll - like the bigger handles that came in because our guide said, man, we need bigger handles. We need bigger handles. Some people want a flat one. Some people want a small one. But you listen. And like we take notes on every reel that comes in for service. We look at wear and tear just to address all those issues when we're designing a new reel.

Marvin Cash (33:49-33:50): Very cool.

Kristen Mustad (33:50-34:36): I mean, just think about if - if a small one is the reel foot, it's got two holes on each side of the screw holes. Those holes are designed so that if you drop your reel on the floor hard enough, the reel foot will bend just before the frame bends.

So I mean, those things, you don't really think about those things. When that thing was solid, we would get reels in that had bent frames from falling. So you could either beef up the frame or put a failure spot in there in the reel foot. A reel foot is 25 bucks, easy to replace. You can bend it back with a plier. If you're caught in a pinch, it's going to look like crap, but it's going to work. But if your frame is bent, you're done.

Marvin Cash (34:36-34:47): Yeah. You're in a world of pain. Well, I mean, that's amazing. How do you keep that kind of velocity? I mean, that's a lot of pressure to put yourself and your team under.

Kristen Mustad (34:47-35:59): I mean, how do you do that year after year? Well, you know what? We, for many years now, we've skipped years on introducing new stuff just because we have a hard time keeping up with what we have. So typically now when we introduce new stuff, it'll be a one-off reel. It'll be one size up in something.

But if we do introduce a brand new line, we're wiping out one and we're putting in a new one. We're not going to come out with a fourth line just because we can't keep up with production right now.

And if we do launch a new line, it's to replace one that we found a way to make that reel better. And that's pretty much what happened with the FWX. We figured out a way to make the reel a lot better, a lot faster.

And hey, at that price point, and it's like, hey, yeah, I could charge a lot more for it. But at the same time, it's like, man, if I charge more for it, I'm opening up a whole new hole because I'm still going to have to make the other one that costs less. I don't have time to make that one. I need to replace it so we can make more money, more reels, satisfy more consumers.

And that's the bottom line. So I replaced the cheapest reel with something that should cost a lot more money.

Marvin Cash (36:01-36:08): Very, very cool. What would surprise the average fly fishing consumer the most about Nautilus Reels? Do you think?

Kristen Mustad (36:10-37:50): I think that people think about us and all the stuff that we manufacture here and they think CNC machines and they think, they probably think robots and stuff, grabbing stuff and machines going into baths and lasers and coming out. And then a whole bunch of people lined up in a long, long line assembling stuff.

We've got 15 employees here. Out of the 15 employees, 14 touch every reel that goes out the door. So the whole component of high-tech machining and automated machining - yeah there's a lot of automated stuff but in the end the bulk of it is by hand. They have to inspect every part. They deburr things by hand. They put them into machines. They take them out. There's an inspection after every step in the process.

And to the point where we did a photo shoot here for an ad campaign about, hey, man, this is handmade. We did a photo shoot with our shop employees in the back of the catalog now, but we also took pictures of their hands because I want to come up with an ad just sort of illustrating, hey, man, look, this guy's doing this part, this guy's doing that part. This is a lot of handwork.

And we take pride in that, and it's done here in the US. This is not some Far East assembly line that's making bone implants one day and fly reels the next. No, this is fly reels. We do nothing else. We make Nautilus fly reels in the shop. So I think that's it. 14 out of 15 people touch every reel.

Marvin Cash (37:50-38:06): That's pretty amazing. I would have never known that if you hadn't shared that with me. We talked about the long slog starting out as an entrepreneur. When did you know that you were going to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish with Nautilus Reels?

Kristen Mustad (38:07-38:58): Day one, my first day, I knew I was going to accomplish it. And I never put my - I never really let my head fall down. It was always up and up and up and up and up and up and up and push and push and push.

And man, we had some extremely tough times. Times where you don't know if you're going to make it, but you just keep pushing. And I think if you don't think you're going to make it at some point and actually start believing that you're not going to make it, you won't.

So, yeah, now I know I've made it. But, hey, you know what? I don't think I'm at the top of the game. I think I'll get to the top of the game. But there's only one way to go from the top. And that's what keeps you sharp is you don't want to go back to those early days when it was a struggle.

Marvin Cash (38:59-39:00): Yeah.

Kristen Mustad (39:00-39:00): And thank you.

Marvin Cash (39:01-39:02): Go ahead. Sorry.

Kristen Mustad (39:02-39:26): That's just what keeps you pushing every day. That's what keeps me trying to improve everything every day. I mean, we're out of the machine shop every day, cutting seconds out of this, cutting minutes out of that, finding a way to - a tool bit that's going to do things faster, a program that's going to do things faster. It's just, it never stops. Rust never sleeps.

Marvin Cash (39:27-39:34): Yeah. I mean, and business just keeps getting nimbler and nimbler with technology. And so, I mean, you just have to keep running, right?

Kristen Mustad (39:35-41:06): Well, I tell you, one of the big challenges for us today is technology. It's like, one, you're going to watch out that you don't get hacked. Because if my computers go down, or if the network goes down, my phones go down, everything goes down. It's terrible because everything's affected by the same thing these days.

And social media is huge. What do you do in social media? It's so challenging for us. We've hired an outside company to do it for us and they're doing a great job. But it's a daily struggle just to keep up with what's around us.

I mean, look at, we've got some major manufacturers now selling on Amazon. It's like, man, what are you guys thinking? I realize your investors want you to make more money, sell more. You got to always show growing numbers. But at what cost? Are you going to put the fly shops out of business? You're competing with the guys that made you who you are.

And I realize it's at the end of the road, that's probably the road that most guys are going to take. But our industry is so peculiar. If we don't have the specialty fly shop, the industry dies. It's going to stop growing. It's barely growing as it is now. And it's just starting to grow again.

If we cut out our specialty fly shop, we are done. There's no way around it. And these guys made us. They made us. And we try to help them out as much as we can, as they help us out when they can.

Marvin Cash (41:08-41:49): Yeah, I always tell people to support the local shops because that information that they share, it's huge. And particularly to like, you and I are about the same age. So we learned from grandparents and uncles and fathers.

But now with the Internet, there's that generational transmission of knowledge is getting harder and harder. And where do you go to know that you can get good advice? Yeah.

So, and I know that it's important to Nautilus to give back. I know you're involved with Bristol Bay, Captains for Clean Water and IndieFly. What drives that desire and what are you doing for each of those causes?

Kristen Mustad (41:50-45:56): So Bristol Bay is one that really, it's the one that I'm always in awe of because we started that, I think right out of the gate, pretty much. We started fighting that mine. I don't know when it started, but it seems like a start of day one and it's just never stopped. It's like a cancer. I mean, it comes back. It's that bad weed in your lawn that never goes, no matter how many of them you pull, they come back.

And man I remember celebrating five or six times that we beat the Pebble Mine guys. And the minute we sit down and go man that was a good beer, let's look for another fight, they pop back up. You're like are you kidding me man? How is this happening? How is this happening to us? You keep beating down this thing that's going to destroy a whole ecosystem and it's like if we let this one go, forget about everything else. We have to put a stop to it.

I applaud the guys that are getting dams torn down. I mean, this is incredible. It's incredible that it's happening. But I bet you there's other guys applying for projects to build new ones. It's just like, gosh, we need to stop this somewhere.

And same with Captains for Clean Water. Captains for Clean Water and Pebble Mine are very, very, very similar. It's about the environment.

IndieFly is about minority communities, remote communities, isolated communities, and educating them on the environment and being stewards for the environment through fly fishing, fishing, guiding, hosting. And it's really - I think it's still very in its infancy. They've done some amazing projects. Most people have seen the ones in the Jungle Fish film that Costa did in Guyana for the arapaima.

I mean, that's a huge success story where everybody used to kill these big fish. And now they had a drought a few years ago, and they ferried the fish over dry land in water-filled dugout canoes into lagoons that still had water to save them because they realize how much money they were, what a resource they were. And they're saving a species doing that, which is amazing.

And so every time we find them, there are a lot of other things that we support. We do a lot for a tournament here that a big law - or actually two brothers who are lawyers here in town started. It's called the Keymorada. It's for Crohn's and Colitis. And it's just - we befriended early on, support them early on. We still do.

We support some schools here. We do fundraisers for a variety of different things. The Herman Lucerne tournament, the tournaments we sponsor. But everything is oriented at either conservation or helping people out.

And it's just - this is something that's where I come from in Europe. Philanthropy is a rare thing. It's happening. The uber wealthy to do it on a scale that they do it in the US is unseen in the rest of the world. People donating a good part of their income to charity was to me when I got here. And it's something I embrace today.

To think that you send your kid to college and college asks you for money to donate money and people do it. You're like, holy crap, you're dropping 60 grand to put your kid to college and you're donating another two or three grand to the college. You're like, what are you doing? You already spent 60. But it's just, it's what you do. It's what you do. And so I mean, I applaud that. That's a very American thing and I applaud it and I embrace it.

Marvin Cash (45:58-46:10): Well, that's very cool. And I know we're kind of at the end of show season now, towards the end of March. If folks didn't have a chance to run into you at one of the shows, why don't you share with them what they can expect from Nautilus in 2019?

Kristen Mustad (46:14-48:02): I mean, shortly what we're launching now is a custom reel builder. So the guys can go online and build their custom reel. What's amazing is last year, 35% of our reels shipped with a custom component on them, whether it's a custom engraving or custom colored parts. And people love mix and matching.

And I mean, we've been trying to get this reel builder off the ground for a while. It's really complex. You have all these different layers. You have to photograph every single part because we didn't want to just Photoshop in a color and make like a sketch like others may have. We did everything in detail.

But if you look at this, I mean, sometimes we'll have a fly shop that'll call and say, hey, I got a customer in here. He thinks he wants a golden purple reel. Is it okay if he comes by to check that out and maybe some other options? It's like, okay, what reel is it?

The guy shows up and we take out the gold reel and the purple parts and he goes, well, can I see the blue parts? Can I see some other color parts? So we'll bring out all the color parts. And after an hour, you walk away and the person's still standing and looking at the table like deer in headlights like what are we doing here.

And he'll spend another two hours trying different parts and then he comes over to you and goes, hey, I wish I'd never done this because now I don't know what I want. It's crazy.

So this for 2019, I think this toy, because it really is a toy and tool, is going to be online, I think, within the next month or so. And as far as new reels go, nothing's really in the pipeline yet. But hey, you never know. We usually get to work a couple of months before the show. So we'll find out this year, the show's in Denver and in October. So we still have a lot of time.

Marvin Cash (48:03-48:07): There you go. And where can folks find for more information about you, Kristen?

Kristen Mustad (48:08-48:39): They can find it on our website, nautilusreels.com, or any of our pro shops. If they go online, I welcome to walk into a pro shop and ask them to see the reels. Most of them know what we're all about, and they can show you a whole bunch of little crazy stuff about these reels.

And we're going to put up some more videos online. We're going to start a more interactive section on the website, maybe some live streams going through reel models, part of the assembly process, part of the manufacturing process, just to share that with viewers.

Marvin Cash (48:40-48:44): That's super cool. Well, Kristen, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today.

Kristen Mustad (48:45-48:53): Thank you, Marvin. And thanks for everything you do with The Articulate Fly. And thanks to your sponsors as well.

Marvin Cash (48:53-49:09): Oh, no, absolutely. I really appreciate it. And folks, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I really appreciate it if you'd give me a review in iTunes. And it would really help us out with our advertisers if you would subscribe to the podcast in the podcatcher of your choice. Tight lines, everybody. Thank you, tight lines.