Does Fly Fishing Need a Women’s Brand?
Founders trying to build in the fly-fishing space often describe the same problem Cassie Abel identified in bikes: gear designed for men and shrunk down and colored-up.
Cassie Abel didn’t start in fly fishing. She started in mountain biking, in-house at a major outdoor brand, watching what the industry did with women’s product. “I was sent boxes of gear from major bike and snow brands. Here’s some gear, wear it. None of it fit, none of it felt good. It felt like the B-league version of their product,” she told me. “Women have been an afterthought for forever, until probably the last five years.” In 2016, in Sun Valley, she started Wild Rye on a bet that women who ride and ski hard are not an afterthought market. They’re the customer. By 2024, Wild Rye was at $4.54 million in revenue, a 55% gross margin, 300-plus retail doors, and a 43% repeat purchase rate. 1
Fly fishing has a comparable gender split and no comparable brand yet. Women made up 41% of first-time fishing participants in the U.S. last year. 2 Yet fly fishing, specifically, still runs about 70% male, 3 and female youth quit the sport at an 11% higher rate than male youth once they turn 18. 4
Three companies are testing whether that gap is real. Ellie Pitney co-founded the apparel brand Soča in late 2023 with three college friends, after a decade of annual fishing trips spent in oversized Orvis shirts that never fit right. “We started as the customer nobody was building for,” she told me. Soča’s answer so far is a targeted line, technical sun shirts, button-downs and jackets, designed around how women’s bodies actually move and fit in the outdoors.
Linda Leary took a stranger path into the same idea. She spent more than 20 years as a business partner at Carlile Transportation Systems, the Alaska trucking company made famous by History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers, rising to company president for the final five years before the sale, part of more than 30 years in the trucking industry overall, 5 before selling her stake and starting Fishe Wear in 2015 out of a corner of her Anchorage office. 6 Fishe Wear has since grown well past apparel–sunshirts and leggings now sit alongside dry bags, waders and wading boots, all wrapped in original artwork and sized from XS to 3XL.
A third case predates both. Kimberly Ranalla launched Miss Mayfly’s first women’s chest wader out of Tennessee in 2018, after concluding that the men’s waders she’d been wearing were “ugly, heavy, stinky... and they were horrible.” 7 Miss Mayfly now markets itself as the only women-owned, women-focused wading gear company in the country. Its sizing system accounts for different body shapes rather than relying on a resized men’s cut, and hundreds of customer reviews support the company’s claims about fit. Miss Mayfly has the longest track record of the three, but none of the three has approached Wild Rye’s scale.
Founders trying to build in this space often describe the same problem Abel identified in bikes: gear designed for men and shrunk down and colored-up. Jess Suvak, a Montana-based Orvis ambassador, sees it from inside the industry. “We definitely went through the shrink it and pink it phase as well. But they need to understand, there’s a lot of very serious women out there that are guides now, and they don’t necessarily want a girly, over-the-top floral outfit. They want to be taken seriously.” Pitney’s version is blunter. “They shrink it and pink it because they don’t want to spend on the R&D to make something actually designed for a woman.” Suvak’s complaint extends to the media built around it. “It’s always like these badass guys doing amazing badass things out in the fly-fishing world. And then when it comes to the girl scene, it’s always like, I’m a mom, and I like fishing in my backyard with my kid, and we’re not really taken seriously.”
The legacy brands have noticed the gap and tried to close it. Orvis launched its 50/50 On the Water initiative in 2017, aiming to bring female fly fishing participation equal to men through women’s-specific gear, guide and ambassador visibility and educational programming. 8 Fly fishing participation for women still sits around 30%, roughly where it stood before the campaign began. That’s not proof the campaign failed. Participation moves on a lot of factors, and the data here doesn’t isolate what 50/50 did or didn’t do. What it does show is that one company’s campaign doesn’t move an industry number by itself. Courtney Despos, who spent more than a decade in the Colorado fly-fishing industry before starting her own outdoor gear brand, Skeyo, has watched campaigns like this across the industry. “I appreciated that some brands went in hard. What I noticed though, was that the marketing struggled to identify, engage and keep involved those who were going to be long-term dedicated–both to the craft and conservation.” Leary, whose brand collaborates with Orvis on some products, gives the effort credit on one specific point. “They’ve got a strong range of sizes in women’s waders,” she said, spanning petite, regular and tall (in 26 sizes). Suvak, who depends on their gear day-to-day, backs that up from the other side of the counter. “The Orvis women’s pro waders are outstanding. Same proprietary fabrics, same panel construction as the men’s. It’s literally the same technically sound wader, except for the zipper.” The product got better. The participation number Orvis set out to move didn’t.
The global fly fishing apparel and accessories market is projected to reach $4.34 billion by 2030. 9 It’s tempting to just take women’s 30% participation share, call a third of that number the addressable market and call it a day. That math doesn’t hold up, however. Spending patterns, product categories and how many women simply buy from general-market brands instead all break the multiplication. What the projection actually tells you is that fly-fishing gear is a real and growing category, not what slice of it belongs to women specifically. None of that stops most people from calling it a niche. Leary hears the “niche” argument constantly and doesn’t let it go unanswered. “How can 20 million women who fish be a niche? 10 That’s how many women there are. I’m still determined that 20 million is not insignificant, and we have a small part of that. We have a long way to go.” From years behind the counter, Despos has seen women buy differently. “Women don’t function like that. A lot of the time in the women’s realm, they want a cute outfit for the trip, but the guide’s bringing everything else. They’re not going to go buy the top-to-bottom brand waders the way a guy will walk out of a shop with a six-thousand-dollar bill for stuff he’ll use once next year.”
Gear can be fixed. Retention is a separate problem, and the churn cited above isn’t really about gear. Pitney thinks it’s about tone. “If it’s nose to the grindstone, we’re catching 800 fish today, and if you don’t, you’re a loser, that’s what kills it. What we’re trying to build is: this is fun, it’s about connecting, it’s about nature.” Leary hears a different version from her own customers. “They see somebody wearing Fishe in an airport, and they run them down. It’s not as much about fishing. It’s just being part of something.” What keeps someone coming back after a bad first trip, or a move, or a baby, isn’t something either founder is confident you can manufacture on demand.
Wild Rye’s own history is more useful than any market-size projection. The bike side of Wild Rye took off almost immediately. The snow side, part of the plan from day one, took years longer to click, and only worked once the brand already had a loyal community to bring with it. Wild Rye applied the same logic to its product line. Wild Rye tested more lifestyle-leaning pieces alongside its technical line, then walked them back. “Our customers really want the performance apparel,” Abel said. “So, we’ve done a lot of work to actually trim back our SKU count.” The instinct most brands have when a market looks bigger than expected is to chase every adjacent product. Wild Rye’s read on its own data said do the opposite. “I think we can absolutely be ten times our size. There’s no question in my mind. We haven’t even tapped the awareness potential out there.” She got a real-world test of that trust in spring 2025, when tariffs hit her production costs hard. She didn’t go to a bank. She went to her own customers instead, raising a Wefunder community round that June. It pulled in more than 600 unique investors writing checks from $100 to $50,000. 11 “It was a really scary thing to put out there in the world. What if no one shows up? But I was blown away by the immediate response. I think we built a level of trust that most brands don’t build with their communities.” It isn’t a finished success story. After a decade, she still needed her community’s money to get through a bad year.
Soča, Fishe Wear and Miss Mayfly are all earlier in that process than Wild Rye is. Which of them gets there, if any, won’t be settled by market-size projections. It’ll come down to whether they can put in the years Abel spent.
It will also have to sit with how Despos sees herself: “I row, I raft, I guide, I fly fish. I’m an angler. Period.” In her view, the market only fully arrives once it no longer needs a brand built around the word “women’s.” And none of the three has settled that question yet.
Wild Rye 2023-2024 revenue, gross margin, retail doors and repeat purchase rate, plus 2025 revenue holding flat at $4.51M against $4.54M in 2024 and a $1.68M net loss for 2025, Wefunder offering materials and financial disclosures.
Women were 41% of first-time fishing participants, RBFF Special Report on Fishing, via Marina Dock Age.
Female youth churn 11% higher than male youth after 18, RBFF Special Report on Fishing, via Marina Dock Age.
Carlile Transportation Systems history, Wikipedia; Commercial Carrier Journal; Leary’s own account via Flylords.
Miss Mayfly founding, 2018, and Kimberly Ranalla’s “ugly, heavy, stinky” waders quote, WBIR; company positioning via Miss Mayfly’s own site.
Orvis 50/50 On the Water, 2017 launch and program description, GearJunkie; Outside Business Journal.
Global fly fishing apparel and accessories market, $4.34B by 2030, Grand View Research.
“20 million women who fish,” Leary’s own approximation in interview, corroborated by the 2025 RBFF/ASA Special Report on Fishing, which found 21.3 million women fished in the U.S. in 2024, Boating Industry.
Wild Rye’s 2025 Wefunder community round, triggered by new tariffs, opened June 2025, Outdoor SportsWire; Wefunder.
 | A guest post by
|
Coming from the perspective of someone who owns a women’s fly fishing school and has worked professionally in the industry for a good while now, I very rarely get feedback from the women I teach, guide, and engage with that they need more options for shirts or waders.
There’s already a tremendous amount of women’s specific fly fishing apparel and gear available across the freshwater and saltwater segments, and it all performs perfectly well.
Free Fly, Duck Camp, and Patagonia all get their fair share of my cash. And when Skwala releases their women’s line in 2027, they’ll get even more of my business than they already do as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a quick women’s line follow from Sitka.
What women actually need in order to excel in fly fishing is education, community, and the opportunity to build sustainable careers as industry professionals. That’s the real foundation.
Want to know what every woman asks me? What rod to buy, what reel to buy, and what fly line to buy. And how to advance their skills.
This idea that women in fly fishing must be first and foremost deeply concerned with “outfits” actually kinda perpetuates the gender-biased construct that focuses way more on image versus skillset.
I’ve followed Cassie Abel and her work with Wild Rye since its inception, and it’s been a community-first brand from the beginning. In my opinion, that’s a large part of why they’ve been so successful. They actually understand their customer. They’ve always connected their product marketing to community marketing and experiential skill-shares.
Leary owns both Fishe and Women’s Fly Fishing and somehow hasn’t fully integrated the two. That’s the real miss.
Nice piece nonetheless, Andrew L.
The old pink it and shrink it approach to women’s apparel is done. Not sure a new brand is needed but existing brands need to design apparel that actually fits a woman’s body if they want that market. It’s not rocket science.