From our friend, Scott Papich, whose company Trackfly, monitors what’s up, what’s down, and so forth:
TrackFly is a data aggregation and analytics platform, connecting specialty retailers, brands and sales professionals. They are helping Angling Trade track key industry trends.
We’ve been saying through spring and summer, the fishing must be pretty good this season, because people are sure getting out there. We know, because they have been buying the “consumables” categories like never before. Flies, leader & tippet, indicators and floatant sales are all up remarkably well over 2024 numbers.
But we also say, this industry isn’t driven by consumables. Yes, they do bring anglers into the fly shop. But, of course, like all outdoor industries, we survive on creating new product and bringing it to market: rods, reels, softgoods, packs, waders and watercraft that anglers read about and put their hands on at their local fly shops.
We had concerns during the first half of 2025 that not enough people have been spending on all the new higher-dollar product that’s been available–in economic terms, we think of this as “discretionary” product, which it is, for anyone who already owns a rod, reel and waders. This is a less-than-favorable trend we’ve been measuring in overall sell-through from February through at least May. Then, June wasn’t too bad, up +2% over prior June in total product sales. And July was up as well.
Finally, in August, we measured significant sell-through growth over the prior year, up over 7% in dollar-sales, with growth in both Units and ASP (Average Selling Price). Almost every product category was up in August. And importantly, the closely watched category of Rods finally had a strong month of growth over prior year, at +10%.
In truth, it’s not been a great year for a number of outdoor industries, and it would be irresponsible of us to ignore the prevalence of much economic news this year that we customarily are not exposed to, specifically around tariffs. For consumers, it created mostly shock and uncertainty; and we have watched measures of Consumer Confidence come in markedly lower than they had been for many years. Consumer Confidence is, of course, a real economic measure, and it’s correlated with a number of economic factors: inflation and cost of living, unemployment numbers, layoff news, even stock market valuations and news of worsening military conflicts, etc. Some economic measures may move in different directions, but, ultimately, they all can influence Consumer Confidence, which is a leading indicator of how people will spend their own discretionary funds. And we all know that consumer spending is about two-thirds of the U.S. economy. So, this matters.
Also, it’s a long-held belief that when the economy goes luke-warm, people go fishing. Our own data, in fact, confirms it. Indeed, lots of people go fishing, and they buy flies, tippet, floatant, beer and coffee. But it does not mean they all spend on the more discretionary higher-dollar categories, like new rods, reels, waders, watercraft, etc. Some will, but not everyone, and this is the story of the first half of 2025.
Then through July and August, some of the news around tariff wars transitioned to news of tariff agreements, which perhaps helped to settle some uncertainty around pricing and inflation. And peoples’ 401k accounts rebounded from the April dip. Consumer Confidence improved along the way, at least through the first half of August. And maybe that’s been enough for the holdouts to finally buy the gear that they have been reading about and seeing in the shop all season.
To recap, June and July were on par with the prior year, but August was really a comeback month for overall sell-through, and for almost every category. YTD sell-through is now recovered to being essentially “flat” for 2025 versus 2024.
It’s worth noting, there has been news of consumer confidence declining again during the first half of September, driven by both economic and non-economic factors. And despite the materialization of some tariff agreements, we should expect further tariff conversations to ebb and flow with any number of other countries. Consequently, we should expect economic uncertainty to rise and fall in the coming months, and perhaps for the next several years.
Holiday season is coming, which we can all plan for with intention. If you purposely keep well stocked on top-selling, highly “giftable” SKU’s, and if you message/market effectively, there may be opportunity for decent incremental sell-through.
TrackFly is here for you, analyzing real POS data in every category every month, and together we can dig deeper into the backstories behind the numbers. We are now offering custom analytics, designed to answer your specific questions.
TrackFly: “You have to make business decisions every day; why not do it with real data and insights on your side?”
