Orvis Built the Church. Duck Camp is Filling the Pews.
Fly fishing isn’t graying out. It’s growing. The question is who’s actually driving that growth, and what that means for the next decade.
The brands that defined fly fishing for a generation have no cultural language for the 24-year-old who found the sport on Instagram.
That’s not an indictment. It’s the most important opening in the industry right now.
According to the American Sportfishing Association, fly fishing added 2.2 million participants in the last decade. The largest age segment in the sport is now 25-to-34. Seventeen percent of everyone who picked up a fly rod in 2024 had never done it before, the highest first-timer rate of any fishing category. The sport isn’t graying out. It’s growing. The question is who’s actually driving that growth, and what that means for the next decade.
I’ll be honest about where I sit: I learned this sport the old way. I came up in the era when the gear you carried was how you proved you belonged. But if I care about this industry growing, and as an investor in it I do, I need to be clear-eyed about what (and who) is doing the heavy recruiting work today. The brands driving that growth look more like Duck Camp than the ones that got me into this sport.
Sim Whatley grew up in Baton Rouge, where hunting and fishing weren’t recreational activities. They were social. He spent ten years building a business overseas, but his memories of the Louisiana hunting and fishing life never stopped pulling at him. Not the gear or the technique. The camp, the ritual, the people you share it with. When he came back to Louisiana and started looking for gear that matched that experience, he found the entire market speaking a different language. Extreme performance. Solo expedition. Hardened individual. That was the emotional vocabulary of the category. Duck Camp was built around what the market wasn’t saying. The lifestyle is the product. The apparel supports the story, not the other way around.
Two other brands had been working versions of the same insight for years, from opposite ends of the country. Howler Brothers had been at it from Austin since 2010. They built Howler around a specific kind of person: someone who surfs, fishes and doesn’t require a single category to define who they are. Free Fly came from a more practical place. Tanner Sutton was guiding on Montana’s Missouri River, miserable in technical shirts that stuck to him like plastic wrap by the end of day and spent 18 months developing a bamboo-blend fabric that solved the problem. He launched out of a bedroom in Charleston in 2011 with a single product. Neither arrived through the front door of the fly shop. That’s the point.
Listen to Tanner Sutton discuss the Free Fly marketing strategy.
Skwala is the most interesting thing happening on the technical side of the market right now. Kevin Sloan founded it in Bozeman in 2022 after working at Sitka and Orvis, two very different laboratories for understanding what premium outdoor customers want. Skwala launched with waders and technical apparel built to field standards and an aesthetic that doesn’t look like it was designed in the 1990s. Sloan understands that the next premium customer cares just as much about how a wader photographs as how it performs. In a world where gear is found on Instagram before it’s tested on a river, aesthetics aren’t secondary. They’re the first filter.
Orvis has been at this since 1856. Over 170 years of catalogs, it did more to introduce Americans to fly fishing than any other single institution in the sport. That credibility is real, and the new schoolers are still earning it. But credibility only converts someone who already decided they want to fish. It doesn’t recruit. Orvis recognized this and recently made a massive bet: it cut 112 employees, closed 36 stores and discontinued their venerable catalog, all in service of a digital-first pivot toward a younger buyer. The intent is right. The difficulty is that Orvis is trying to become something different while remaining recognizably Orvis, and those two things pull hard against each other. Patagonia is the proof case that a technical brand can build lasting cultural resonance, but Patagonia required a specific founder conviction and a specific cultural moment that aren’t available for replication. You cannot reverse-engineer Yvon Chouinard.
There also is a more idiosyncratic signal worth paying attention to: Fly fishing is entering fashion. South2 West8, the Japanese brand founded by lifelong Tenkara fisherman Kaname Nagaoka, collaborated with Supreme in 2021 on a co-branded Tenkara rod that retailed for $448 and dropped alongside jackets and fleeces in a global streetwear release. Creek Angler’s Device runs pop-ups in SoHo where fishing vests disappear before noon. These are not fishing companies courting the fashion world. They are fashion brands that found fly fishing first. That distinction matters.
When a subculture gets aestheticized at the Supreme-and-Kith level, it becomes aspirational to people who have never stood in a river. That’s recruitment of a different order, and it happens before any purchase decision, before any rod is picked up, before a single cast is made.
What the new schoolers have figured out has nothing to do with gear.
The next generation of fly anglers doesn’t need to be convinced the sport is serious. They need to be convinced it’s theirs.
I came up in the church Orvis built. The brands I’m watching now aren’t renovating it. They’re building the next one.
Duck Camp’s Guide’s Guide Series, featuring Captain Owen Gayler. More on Owen from Hunter Leavine–an interview with the south Texas hunter, redfish guide and stage four cancer patient. “Before the recording began, I knew this conversation would be different. I had a hunger to hear more about how Owen’s journey has shaped how he now sees life, faith, family–and of course, the water. Again, he was more vulnerable than most. ‘I am grateful for cancer… even if it kills me… because of what it has done for my life. It taught me that relationships are what matter the most.’”
Andrew Luter is the founder of Rio Chato Investments and the Substack: Notes From The Boat. He backs early-stage outdoor recreation and lifestyle brands, the kind of companies building gear and experiences for people who’d rather be outside. He’s based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is basically a full-time reminder of why this space matters.
 | A guest post by
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We had some feedback on this article and a quick correction. The correction: in the original, we had noted that Kevin Sloan, the founder of Skwala, had worked at Patagonia, but, actually, it was others on their small team, as noted on Skwala’s website: “Our small team has roots in brands like Sitka, Patagonia, Simms and Yeti.” That reporting has been updated in the piece. Also, “Below-board Journalism and Graft”: We also received some feedback that the Flylab media brand, based on this article, has become a platform for investors to shill for their investments. This allegation is patently false. The writer for the piece, Andrew Luter, is perfectly capable of defending himself, and will, but he is not writing, investing or “shilling” for any of these brands. He is an independent writer. We posted a link to his Rio Chato website in the article footer, if you’re interested in sleuthing around about his background and business focus–have at it. Andrew is a writer with deep investment, startup and outdoor space IP, and his perspectives are thoughtful and challenging in a category of, frankly, mailed in and antiquated thinking. End of the day, he and Flylab are not mouthpieces for equity land grabs parading as media brands. ~Andrew
The 'aesthetics are the first filter' point is exactly right. The piece worth adding is what filters at the second stage. Aesthetics recruit. Substance retains. The 25-year-old who comes in through Duck Camp's Instagram stays in the sport because someone hands them a Norman Maclean book five years later, or because a piece of real writing hits their feed at the right moment. The new church needs both kinds of architecture. The brands you named are building the entrance. The writers are quietly building the nave.