As some of you may have noticed, Tenkara USA rolled out its new dealer program a couple of weeks ago. The demand from stores to carry our products has been incredible from the beginning. As many of them have said over and over again, there hasn't been anything really new in the industry in many years, and tenkara is just that. In light of that, we decided to slowly start offering our products to stores with a physical retail location, so that you may go visit them and feel the rods for yourself.
Many dealers share our perception that tenkara may be something that was missing in the sport, a simpler fly-fishing alternative. The number of new participants in the sport has been minimal, which translates into a very slow and mature industry, and in turn brings few new things to the market, and also makes it hard to continually attract customers back into the fly shop. Based on our customer demographics, largely comprise of anglers with MANY years of experience, or outdoor enthusiasts completely new to fly-fishing, we believe tenkara is something that will excite loyal long-time fly shop customers and will open the doors to many new enthusiasts.
Tenkara USA will be working with the best independent fly shops in select regions. The first stores to start carrying our products are: The Bear's Den (Taunton, MA), Creative Sports Fly Shop(Pleasant Hill, CA), Wildfly/Campsaver (Logan, UT), Mossy Creek Fly Fishing (Harrisonburg, VA) . These shops are great at what they do, have a good reputation in their markets, and above all, are as enthusiastic about tenkara as we are. We will not push our products to any store, so if you see our products in a store, it's because its owners got the concept and have become fans of tenkara too. These dealers understand the importance of something new in the industry, but most importantly they find the simplicity of tenkara refreshing and see the great effectiveness of using a long rod with no reel. We're proud to work with them, and hope they don't blame us when their western rods, and reels start accumulating dust.