Do We Make Money?

Do we make money? The short answer is NO.

Making one's own soft plastic baits is quite an expensive hobby, and it is a hobby for us. We do not do this full time. The costs associated to do so are somewhat surprising to most people. Here we outline some of these costs.

Infrastructer:

  • Injection Machine. A Jacobs Press that has a 48-ounce capacity.
  • Hand Injectors. A half a dozen or so hand injectors.
  • C-blocks and blending blocks.
  • Melting pots. A pair of one-gallon Sta-Warm melting pots.
  • Lead furnace.
  • Tube dipping rod bundles. 9 bundles of 8 rods apiece.
  • Tube tail splitter.
  • And of course, molds. Lots and lots of molds!

Materials:

  • Various blends of plastisol.
  • Glitters.
  • Straight colorant.
  • Pearl powders.
  • Color shifts.

Packaging supplies:

  • Bags
  • Clamshells
  • Thermal printer.
  • Thermal labels (package and shipping).
  • Shipping boxes and packaging tape.

Cost of doing business:

  • Cost of this web site.
  • 2.9% of all sales goes to Shopify.
  • $0.30 for each order taken.
  • 10% Federal Excise Tax on the retail price of lures and tackle (IRC 4161).
  • And, being good Americans, we pay taxes on any profits achieved.

Man hours:

As with other costs associated with making one's own baits and tackle, the man hours required to do so is also a surprise to most. We are not Zoom, Googan, Yamamoto, Berkley, .. We do not have large, automated factories. The man hours stack up very quickly:

  • Clean our equipment (As we always do to start a bait making session).
  • Pre-heat molds and injectors.
  • Create the material mixes we are going to inject.
  • Inject molds, let them cool and de-mold the baits.
  • Clean out hand injectors between mold shots.
  • Hang baits for curing.
  • At least 48 hours later (baits are cured) we package the baits into their packaging containers.
  • When an order comes in, we need to box up the order, weight it and drive to the post office.
  • To be blunt, we are making a lot less than the Michigan State minimum wage for our time invested, to say nothing about attempting to re-cooperate our infrastructure costs.
  • In the end though, we are not attempting to make any significant money (see below).

So, why do we do this?

We do not believe we need to say it, but we love to fish. On bad weather days and over the winter since we are not fishing, we do the next best thing which it we make baits. We re-invest every penny we acquire back into the 'business' primarily to purchase more molds. One can never have enough molds! Our goal is to be able to try out different bait profiles and bait sizes.