Alpha Might Be New to You…
Welcome to the Alpha Angler blog, and more importantly thanks for reading. My plan is to explain who we are at Alpha, and more specifically “what are we doing here.”
We officially started Alpha in 2012, with the intention of building really, really good fishing rods. Fishing 15-21 competitive events a year, the engineer inside of me started to ask questions about my fishing tools, like “how does this help me catch more fish.” That’s really the crux of the situation when you boil it down, right? From recreational to tournament anglers, how do we generate more bites and more importantly put them in the boat.
History Lesson:
Before Alpha, I spent a decade working for a very successful outdoor hunting brand, where I learned a ton about building products for outdoorsmen. For the purpose of this article, the most important thing I learned is this: the best products don’t come from a secluded think-tank of engineers and product designers hidden in the basement with incandescent blue lights. The best products are always developed by the guys using them day in and day out. That’s Alpha Angler’s program, our M.O. if you will. We relentlessly hunted down every successful angler that would talk with us, and started picking their brains about winning techniques and rods. The funny thing is that none of them declined the invitation to contribute, regardless of their current sponsorships.
Pop Quiz:
Over the past years we developed a system of making rods to solve problems for anglers. For instance, what type of rod generates the most bites with a “chatterbait”, and more importantly why. What is the best blank material for moving baits? What is the difference between 30 ton and 24 ton graphite, and what does that really do for me? Am I paying for technology, or just bling? Why does this $500 rod feel so tip heavy…?? The list of questions goes on for hours, and we’ve asked everyone of them 100 times.
Direct to Consumer:
They say the best blog articles are shorter than the longer ones… I don’t understand what that means, but for the purpose of this blog I’ll sum up what we’re doing with Alpha. We’re making really, really good fishing rods, unconventionally. We’ve researched every aspect of the fishing rod market, and we’re going to do things our way, the Alpha way.
To keep costs down, we’re only going to sell direct to customer, no retailers. This isn’t because we don’t like retail, it’s because we need to stay in constant communication with the anglers who use our products. Retail adds a layer of customer interaction we can’t utilize because we can’t be in every retail outlet speaking with you.
Brass Tacks:
Instead of pricing products with the retail markup included, we’ll skip that portion and give back to the customer in the form of lower prices for better products. That provides an awesome freedom in how we build our products. We can use any component, from any manufacture to build rods that are the very best… and we do.
One thing is for certain, we have a passion for fishing which is paramount in our mission to create great products. You’ll see this characteristic in everything we do, from our Pro-Staffer’s to our product line to our social media content. We plan on using this blog to educate and communicate, so please send feedback. Thanks for reading, and more importantly, welcome to Alpha Angler.
