Flylab Interview: Adam Hudson

Flylab Interview: Adam Hudson

Adam Hudson is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Line Fly Co., a direct-to-consumer fly-fishing brand, providing hand-tied flies for bass, trout, bream, carp and redfish. “Hailing from the great state of Alabama,” Adam, along with his partner “Hobo Steve,” have spent years crafting and fine-tuning their smallmouth bass patterns for a loyal following of warmwater and trout fishing enthusiasts. In a world of mass produced everything, Blue Line Fly Co. is creating highly functional, well-constructed and affordable fly patterns–as well as proving that bootstrapped brands, built with ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, can still punch their weight and stand above the fray.  

Adam, where are you from and what do you do?

Sure thing. My name is Adam Hudson, and I’m from north Alabama and started Blue Line Flies with my business partner, Steven. He also goes by the street name “Hobo Steve,” for any of those who might know him.

How did he get the nickname “Hobo Steve”?

Well, he lives like a hobo would live. He’s one of the cheapest people on the planet, and he doesn’t spend any money he doesn’t have, unless it’s on fly-fishing gear. The only thing separating Hobo Steve and an actual homeless person is that he lives in a house. That’s it. Everything else is the exact same.

Hobo Steve and I have been fishing friends since the sixth grade in middle school. We both grew up on a stretch of smallmouth river in Alabama and would go over to each other’s houses, especially in the summer after school. We both could get down to the creek anytime we wanted–completely different stretches of water, but it was fun to start exploring when we were young and trying to figure out how to catch bass on flies.

We both liked brim fishing, and when you’re in sixth grade, you like brim fishing, because you can catch fish. When you’re young, you just want to catch any fish. But every once in a while, we would get a small bass to hit our brim flies, and we started to care more about the bass than the brim. We started wondering, how do we start catching more of these? And answering that single question–well, that has changed the rest of my life. We started tying flies trying to imitate what the bass anglers were throwing...

In Alabama, I assume bass (largemouth and smallmouth) are king?

Yes, 100%–in north Alabama, largemouth bass fishing is king. We started by wanting to make “lures” that we could throw on our fly rods, based on what the conventional guys were throwing. But there were no fly shops. There was nowhere to buy any sort of fly-fishing gear within a two-to-three hour drive of north Alabama. You could find some little brim poppers here and there, but that stuff wasn’t working for the bigger bass. 

So, we started tying flies and developing patterns that we could throw on our fly rods and that mimicked the baits the tournament bass guys were throwing: Zara Spooks, big swimbaits or Rat-L-Traps. I guess we thought that fly rods were just more fun to fish with. We also didn’t have to contend with the stigma of east coast or western fly fishing–that the sport is only for trout, that you use tiny flies etc. No one really cared how we were fishing.

Certainly, my introduction to fly fishing is very different from someone who grew up in Montana, Colorado or Utah. We thought we were simply presenting different kinds of lures to fish. We had no conception of this being a “different sport.” And you know, still to this day, I maintain that original mindset: that fly fishing, for us, is just a different way of fishing, but not that different from the conventional guys. It isn’t this “magical,” “mysterious” thing that a lot of people make it out to be. All this baggage can be a little overwhelming when you’re getting into the sport.

Kids are much more single-minded–I’m sure all you cared about were your “lures” and whether they worked or not...

Exactly.

The only place to buy fly gear at the time was Cabela’s, when they’d mail out their “bible”–the massive hard copy you’d get in the mail twice a year. One for Christmas, the other in the spring or summer. You had to write down what you wanted and mail it to them, and they’d mail it back. This is where we were getting all of our fly-tying stuff.

I was still very young, and if we went on vacation with my family and there was a fly shop nearby, I was like, come hell or high water, I’m hitting this fly shop. I would spend every dollar that I had to my name, either from birthdays or Christmas.

Did you guys have any local fly-tying classes or mentors?

Those things didn’t exist. In north Alabama, there aren’t any fly shops. There’s no one who knows how to tie flies, let alone our bass flies.

My parents were a huge, positive influence. Neither of them fly fished, but they both completely supported me wanting to do things outside, like fishing. They both were very helpful in making sure I had some of the things I needed to get started: fishing equipment, a fly-tying beginner kit, fly-tying videos on VHS tapes. I literally learned fly tying from Cabela’s VHS tapes I got in the mail. I could pause and rewind or fast forward lessons on a few basic flies: Elk Hair Caddis, Woolly Buggers. But I quickly realized these patterns weren’t the type of flies I wanted to tie. Even back then, all Cabela’s carried for warmwater flies were small poppers, or maybe they had some Clouser Minnows or Deceivers for saltwater patterns. But even then, the hooks were too big. These big, beefy saltwater hooks weren’t ideal for bass fishing. Over time, we started transitioning these saltwater baitfish patterns to standard bass hooks.

We really started to dial it in as I got a little bit older. We had some early success, but not a ton. As anyone knows who’s ever tied a fly, when you’re brand new, you’re not going to be great. Most of our R&D happened on the water, trying to figure out how to make these flies swim and work like the real stuff. Once I turned 16 and could drive down to the river, the testing became a lot easier. By the time I was in high school, we were hitting our stride, putting bigger, better flies together and starting to really catch fish.

What was the breakthrough R&D moment? Was it color? movement? or all of it?

The number one thing was color.

The bass guys are all throwing this black or purple worm or this white and chartreuse Rat-L-Trap. That was the first and easiest thing for me to figure out–how to match the color, right? Then we could start adapting these colors to our patterns with different types of materials. I guess it was my senior year after I graduated from high school and before college, I had a summer job where I’d work in the morning and had the afternoons off. Every day, Hobo Steve and I would go fishing and continue to test and tweak our patterns. At the end of the day, it was a little bit of everything: time on the water equals fish. I’m sure a lot of folks reading this could probably relate–there wasn’t one single moment when you’re on the river and, all of a sudden, everything just comes together. It’s about time spent and paying your dues–the weeks and months add up, and you’ve been there enough…

We were becoming pretty dangerous at putting the colors and materials together, and now, we were starting to figure out where these fish lived. You have to remember, not that many people are river fishing in Alabama; most are lake fishing. So, we didn’t have anyone telling us where these fish lived in the rivers. We spent gazillions of hours casting at every little cubic inch, watching and walking through the river, seeing the places we were spooking fish, starting to pattern the water they’re in–hand picking the water to focus on.

We finally started putting the puzzle pieces together. We started consistently hooking fish, and it didn’t feel like some freak occurrence. Sometimes, fish make mistakes and you get lucky, but other times, you know you actually tricked that fish and you didn’t get lucky. That fish was earned. That was a turning point, and when I became addicted.

Looking back, you probably didn’t realize how spoiled you were–fishing all these remote rivers and you’re the only guys out there. Not really today’s western river drift boat experience…

Yeah, not exactly. We’d see some guys floating down in kayaks or canoes, throwing spin gear every once in a while–catfish, largemouth, smallmouth, but mostly, we had all the water to ourselves. Growing up in the south, and in the west too, there’s so much water to explore if you just look around and pull out a map. It was years and years until we ever saw anyone fly fishing in our spots. Even still, there’s so much more water to spread people out in the south, and you very rarely see anyone.

That’s incredible to think about in today’s day and age.

This is one of the biggest reasons I love bass fishing. In Idaho, where I live now, even on a very popular bass river, you may see two other boats in a day who are actually targeting fish. Of course, you’ll see other kayakers and canoeists, which is great. Trout are fun, and I love trout fishing too–I used to guide quite a bit and as most guides know, trout are the species that put food on the table.

You can make a lot more money running trout trips, but nowadays, we have enough folks who know about us (Blue Line) and who dig warmwater fishing. It’s definitely becoming more popular, and I don’t run trout trips anymore, unless I can help it. I enjoy trout fishing on my days off, but for the most part, what I want to do is smallmouth fish. They’re so resilient and can survive cold winters and hot summers from Texas to Canada. I live in Boise, and the fishing’s been great up here. The only thing they really don’t like is hot, stagnant water.

But even in Idaho, people have an unpopular opinion about them, because they’re not native. They were also introduced, just like the rainbow and brown trout. They might not get the headlines, but we should find ways to protect them too.

When you started thinking about your fly business, how did you determine the viability of the smallmouth (fly-fishing) market?

I was actually working at a fly shop in Alabama, and we were starting to see people come in and ask questions about warmwater fishing, whether it was carp, gar, brim or bass. I also was our fly buyer. I would scour every company that sold flies, trying to find patterns I knew the bass would eat, but there was nothing really out there. We’d order a few saltwater patterns here and there, and we’d also sell some patterns I developed myself. This must’ve been 2014, and I was looking at every fly catalog under the sun, saying, “Okay, I want some bass flies. Where do I buy those?” But the only thing you could find were poppers. 

At this point, I probably had developed a dozen original patterns for bass, and we started tying them in-house–no one else was doing this. Customers loved the flies, because they worked. It progressed pretty quickly, and we started thinking about wholesale–we thought to ourselves, every other fly shop in the south must have this problem? If you needed any trout bug on the planet, you had your choice from six or seven different companies. Take your pick. But for bass flies? They didn’t exist.

I thought to myself, there have to be other companies who’d be interested in doing this with us. We started reaching out to fly shops. We saved up enough money to launch the wholesale company and got our first order. I think we spent three years developing the patterns and “R&D-ing” the samples from a dozen different factories. When I wasn’t working, I did nothing for a year except test sample flies. I knew it was never going to be scalable with me tying them all–that wasn’t for us. We needed to get these flies manufactured.

What’s unfortunate is that we couldn’t, and still can’t, find a single quality and reasonably-priced U.S. fly manufacturer, and we’ve looked really hard at it. They don’t exist. It’s the same reason so many fly rods are made overseas. People won’t respond to the price point. Everyone wants the “made in the USA” product, but no one wants to pay the receipt. That’s just the harsh reality. We certainly keep trying, and the minute we can figure it out, we’ll get our flies made in the U.S. But at this point, they’re made overseas, just like every other large-scale fly manufacturer.

It all comes down to how much you’d have to pay “per fly” as a consumer and our math says we’d have to double our prices. Some of our bigger (articulated, deer hair) flies are already retailing for $10 or $12 and they might be tied with $5 to $6 in materials. The math simply doesn’t work. On the upside, we’re using 10 to 15 pound tippet, so you’re not losing a lot of them.

When did you officially launch Blue Line Fly Co.?

Well, we had all the flies made and tested and we saved up. If nothing else, we’ve got flies that we’ll use ourselves for the rest of our lives, right? If this thing is a total flop, we’ll keep our product and never stop fishing. 

One of my biggest break points in deciding to pull the trigger was on a guided trip. You’re with a client who’s paying, and you want to give them the best advantage to catch a fish that you can. I had a guy in the boat who’d never really streamer fished, which is pretty common.

It was his first time throwing sinking fly lines. And my client, bless him, every guide who’s reading this will understand–in the first good run, he tries to cast under a tree, hangs up and breaks off, with one of my new test flies. Again, it’s not his fault in any way. But I guess I was frustrated he had just thrown this big, expensive Blue Line sample that had taken me 20 minutes to tie the night before, and I’m springing to cover it.

It was totally unfair to the customer, but in the moment, it was bugging me. When I got off the water, I called Hobo Steve and said, “We’re doing it. We’re dropping the cash to figure this out…”

That’s how Blue Line came about and how we ended up getting our first run of flies.

What prompted the decision to sell direct-to-consumers?

I guess no other fly shops wanting our fly patterns? There was very little interest. Next to none of them would give me the time of day, or even wanted to talk. They weren’t interested in these bass patterns for whatever reason. Maybe it was our brand positioning–that I was a new company? But no one would take me seriously. No one cared. Maybe the timing was wrong, but 99% of the shops still didn’t have the right bass flies. So, it was odd.   

We definitely encountered some road blocks along the way. Hobo Steve wanted to make sure our flies were the best quality on the market and that we also were underpriced. And even if the fly shops weren’t receptive, we knew people loved the flies. But at that point, we really hadn’t considered building a website. We just wanted fly shops to get them into the hands of customers. The DTC aspect had never crossed my mind, because I also worked in a fly shop, and I didn’t think it would be necessary. 

But we had to pivot. We were largely dead in the water for about a year, trying to figure out what we were going to do. We knew people liked the flies, but we had no idea how many would really be interested. But we also knew, just like in northern Alabama, so many people didn’t have a fly shop in their town. Boise has two proper fly shops, but I’m coming from a place that has zero. So, at the end of the day, we figured, screw these people (the non-interested shops), and we focused on the customers who needed our product–durable, functional flies for bass. We had to take a step back from the business side of things and say, what are we doing?

We want people to be able to enjoy bass fishing with flies. They don’t need a fly shop. All the shop is going to do is show our product to customers, and we can do that ourselves. We said, okay, Instagram, social media, e-commerce–that’s going to be our “fly shop” reach, and we’re going to learn and lean into that. We knew people cared about bass fishing–we just had to find them.

It’s interesting to think about all the road blocks you were experiencing on the B2B side of the business, but at the same time, e-commerce and social media were exploding…  

Well, at first, we simply started talking to people–that was the grassroots of Blue Line. All of our friends were supportive. We got our flies in the hands of people we personally knew, and who did the kind of fishing that we did. And we got incredibly good responses. People were extremely enthusiastic. Friends started becoming customers, and we slowly started growing our customer base–Alabama, southern Tennessee, maybe a little bit of Georgia. We were getting a foothold in the south. I still remember the first sale we made to someone that we didn’t know. 

It was pretty easy to get the word out. “Hey, we’ve got these flies. We’re making good deals on them.” We didn’t have any overhead except our time. If someone’s interested, call me! Pretty quickly we had to build a website. We were packing orders out of my basement. And we sold nothing but our flies. We didn’t have any T-shirts, hats or fishing gear–no fly lines, no tippet, no leaders.

But to answer your media thought, yes, social and e-commerce we knew were exploding, but we had to get our flies in people’s hands first.

Your business focus was incredibly singleminded–you weren’t thinking about 200 other things like everyone else.  

Yup, we have an extremely rigorous testing and R&D process. We still test flies for almost two years before ever bringing them to market. By the time a fly hits our website, it’s already four years old (designed, manufactured, tested), and the fly has been fished all over the country.

The original design and development? I still do it myself, and I tie all of the R&D flies. Then we get them out to our guides, industry pros and people we respect. Once the fly gets produced from the factory, it’s a Blue Line pattern, and I no longer tie them. But it needs to be good enough that I’m happy to fish the manufactured version of the fly. Today, if you go on a guided trip with me, practically everything we’re going to throw is coming from the Blue Line factory–these are staple patterns.

That’s my last criteria for the fly–is it close enough to the original that I no longer have to tie the pattern? If the answer is yes, we green light the pattern. If the answer is no, it’s back to the drawing board, and we figure something else out.

Those are high standards, but with flies, it always matters…

Yeah, quality and consistency matter a ton to me. If you walk into my room right now, it’s not very organized, but I’m very Type A about gear and fishing and the things I’m going to use on the water. If we get a wind knot in the leader, it’s getting fixed.  

The difference between someone who’s an accomplished angler and someone who’s either learning or just out there to have fun–is the complete focus on process. If I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it right, every time. Not once in a while…

Over the years, that mentality has bled into Blue Line.

The fish that matter care about details–like the ones on the Henry’s Fork, they care…

Yeah, they care. Those are smart fish.

What does the future hold for Blue Line?

Well, we’re still working on getting Hobo Steve full-time. He’s in charge of all the “behind the scenes” stuff that you never see, but keeps the company running.

We also understand that the reality of this business is that we have to be in the trout market. I’m very biased towards smallmouth, but we also love trout fishing, and we’ll keep applying all of our bass theories to trout, when we can.

But every fly that we’ve developed was designed to fit a specific need on the water. Our products are created to solve problems we run into on the river. And we’ll never make a fly to simply “sell” it. We’ve never done that, and we won’t.

For example, our newest grasshopper pattern that just came out–we were fishing out west in Montana last summer and the grasshoppers were tiny. Little grasshoppers, like size tens. We got a bunch of small grasshoppers in the local fly shops, but every one of them had the smallest hook gap you’ve ever seen. I had a day where I was losing big fish after big fish, because the hook gaps on these hoppers were so small.

So, I sat down the next day and tied a grasshopper that I liked, with the correct sized hook gap, and started fishing it–that fly became the Hudson Hopper. It solved a problem… 

We’ve definitely been focusing more and more on the trout world–certainly, that’s a big benefit of our company moving to Idaho. Hobo Steve still lives in north Alabama, where he has access to smallmouth. We still fish in the south a ton. We can do a little bit of everything, whether it’s dry flies on the Henry’s Fork, or high mountain stream stuff. It provides such a wide array of geographic areas to test flies.

Someday, we’d like to have a local fly shop or pickup option. We are starting to become busier and busier–nowadays we’re selling and shipping 10,000 flies a month. And all the fly shops who wouldn’t talk to us years ago? Now they’re calling and saying, “Hey, do you sell your patterns wholesale? Because we’d love to carry some…”

We’re starting to be in a lot more fly shops. (If you’re reading this and want to see our flies in a local fly shop, tell them to call me! We’ll happily get them set up with our dealer forms.) That’s one way we want to continue expanding, which is great.

But the majority of people in rural areas are still underserved in the fly market. That’s never going to change for us. Those are the customers and markets that can’t compete with Salt Lake City and Denver. It’s just as important that they have representation in the fly space–rural Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, New Mexico, even Utah and Montana.

And the rivers in these places matter too. Obviously, it’s awesome that there are all these famous river foundations across the U.S., but there’s a gazillion more rivers that aren’t famous, or don’t have some sort of foundation or riverkeeper society. And if you can convince some local folks to get out on that water, they’ll end up having a really special moment, a good day with their buddies. No matter what they’re catching, even if it’s bass, brim, carp, or catfish.

And then the next time they see on the local news that some strip mine is going to ruin all the fishing, you’ll have a lot more grassroots (local) people interested in these fisheries. I’m gonna get crucified for saying this, but doesn’t the Madison River already have enough people looking after it?

I don’t think anyone is going to crucify you for caring about rivers, and these “less popular” rivers in particular…

There are still a lot of special places and species that have no voice or anyone watching after them.

It might not be popular, but we should care about these rivers and fish too.

Eventually, that river you’re not really thinking or caring about, well, it’s bound to meet up with the one you do.

Obviously, there’s still a lot of work left to do.

How can people get involved? 

Get out a map, pick a new “favorite” river and go explore…