Why Orlando is a Bucket List Destination for Fly Dealers This Summer
A globetrotting fly dealer explains the reason he’s carved out a trip to ICAST for the last 20 years.
Permit Alley sits midway down the coast of Belize. About 80 miles from the ancient Mayan temple complex at Xunantunich, warm, Caribbean waters lap onto a placid shoreline that’s dappled with seagrape trees, hand-painted wooden fishing boats and beach bars serving up cold, Bilikin beer. On busy nights, those waterholes echo with the sounds of steel drums and fishing stories, long-held traditions of the Garifuna people and the anglers that come to their stretch of Caribbean coastline to pursue permit and bonefish on the fly.
For several days each year, this is Chris Frangiosa’s workplace.
“I do a lot of travel,” says Frangiosa, the retail manager for TCO Fly Shop. “One week, I may be doing a group trip out to the Pacific Northwest to do some steelhead fishing supported by one of our manufacturers. The next week, I may work from home in what would be a normal office day. Sometimes, I am down in Belize for two weeks fishing in a spectrum of different environments.”
Today, Frangiosa holds what might be a fly angler’s ultimate dream job. He often works remotely, managing a team of some 75 members at the Pennsylvania-based fly-fishing store. On occasion, he makes spontaneous climate swaps between the foothills of Appalachia, the West Coast and the Caribbean. But in July, he’ll be carving out time to visit a destination with a more subtle fly fishing pedigree–Orlando, Florida.
For the past 20 years, Frangiosa has been a regular summertime visitor to Orlando, but he rarely sees a famed cartoon mouse. Instead, he flies in for ICAST, the largest trade show in sportfishing and the biggest buying event in the sport. For nearly 70 years, ICAST and its predecessors have been the go-to destination for retailers in search of new products for store shelves.
Recently, fly fishing has grown in emphasis at the trade show, which commonly draws around 13,000 attendees from more than 70 nations and all 50 states. In 2023, ICAST created a replica fly shop, the ICAST Fly Shop, right on the show floor. In both 2023 and 2024, ICAST further enhanced fly fishing’s prominence by expanding fly categories in the ICAST New Product Showcase Best of Category Awards. And in 2025, ICAST became an official stop for the Fly Fishing Film Tour.
The goal? Outreach. According to TakeMeFishing.org, around 13% of the 57.9 million American anglers who went fishing in 2024 identified as fly anglers. And the organizers of ICAST at the American Sportfishing Association are eager to build new bridges with that community. While fly fishing has always had a presence at ICAST, show organizers hope the renewed emphasis on connecting the worlds of conventional tackle and fly fishing will mutually benefit anglers across the United States.
Frangiosa is one of those links.
“I worked for Orvis first,” says Frangiosa. “Then I went to school for economics, and TCO hired me because they wanted to expand. When I was hired, they had five employees. Now, we have 75 in five locations that are prospering.”
That kind of success doesn’t happen overnight. Frangiosa credits years of networking, research and trial-and-error to get to that point. And, he credits perpetual visits to ICAST, where he’s been able to build strong relationships with manufacturers before they take off. “As a retailer, you have access to seeing brands that you normally would not ever see or have heard of at ICAST,” says Frangiosa. “There are a lot of smaller manufacturers that don’t have the digital bandwidth to reach everyone online through marketing or other advertising opportunities, but they see the show as a chance to get in front of a lot of new people.”
Frangiosa says that three years ago, meteoric outdoor speaker brand Turtle Box was one such exhibitor. Today, it’s hard to become a Turtle Box dealer. But thanks to relationships forged at ICAST–when the brand was still a fledgling startup–Frangiosa and TCO became an early distributor of the brand. Over the past three years, Turtle Box sales at TCO stores have blossomed, all thanks to an introduction in Orlando.
“There are many examples of that type of relationship,” Frangiosa adds. “If you’re not keeping your hand on the pulse of what is happening, you don’t realize which products are up next until they are out of reach.”
An entry-level booth at ICAST costs startup brands about $1,600. That’s less than the cost of a modest Google Adwords or commercial campaign. And the relatively low cost of admission is a beacon for manufacturers selling new products that can keep customers more interested in repeat visits to retail stores. “Brick-and-mortar stores need to stay focused on keeping the customer engaged,” Frangiosa adds. “When they walk in the door, they want to see something new that they haven’t seen before, not the same old thing. Otherwise, they just shop online.”
Frangiosa will be at ICAST 2026, leading a team of buyers for TCO Fly Shop. He’ll also be a featured speaker, hosting business seminars at ICAST Live.
Registration for ICAST 2026 is underway at ICASTFishing.org. For a chance to win one of five free trips to ICAST 2026 courtesy of the American Sportfishing Association, register today.
