Home > Learning Center > Reeling in More than Trout

Reeling in More than Trout

 

By ARRISSIA OWEN TURNER
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 10:08 AM PDT

Brad Matz believes 90 percent of anglers may get hooked on his invention, the Snap'r. The Big Bear Valley resident was one of the 90 percent who he says only catches about 10 percent of the fish that get hooked. He thinks he's found the cure.

The self-proclaimed “fishing nut” grew tired of missing the tug. He says the reason those 10 percent of anglers do so well is they have fine-tuned their fishing, developing an inordinate sense of the fish's initial tug, which the average angler misses.

Now, his 2-year-old daughter Madelyn has proven his theories. Three years after working to perfect the Snap'r, even little Madelyn can bring home a good catch with the help of the product.

The Snap'r, patent pending, came to Matz in a click. After months holed up in his garage every spare moment trying to figure out a device to fulfill his dream, it happened while bored at work.

His lack of customers one day kept his fingers fidgeting. “I have to thank the Bic,” he says. The recoil of the ballpoint pen brought the product's design into focus.

The Snap'r is tied to the fishing pole, weight or bobber, depending where you like to drop your bait, then tied to the swivel and to the other end of the hook once baited. Pull the cable out, a little ball bearing shows up, you push in the notch and cast it. When the fish bites, it pulls it off. Snap! It automatically sets the hook.

Now that the product is finished, Matz is experiencing a crash course in business and marketing for Snap'rCo. The company is one of the sponsors of the upcoming Big Bear Lake Troutfest Oct. 7-8, and Matz and his wife, Sarah, set off on a grass roots marketing campaign. They walk up to anglers and hand them the product to test on the spot. The results have been overwhelming, he says.

After an invitation from the administration at Hesperia Lake to hand out their product, they were asked to leave, Matz says. “Everyone caught their limits within hours,” he says, adding the lake officials said the product worked too good. It could be because of the product's extra special weapon, the chum strip.

Chum is extra food put into the water to attract fish. The black plastic device has a felt strip on the side that soaks up chum, creating a chum cloud around the fishing line, which Matz believes brings more fish near the bait.

While there are purists in the sport who shun such devices, the others who struggle to leave lakes with a cooler full of fish are seeing spectacular results. Those are Matz's customers, he hopes. “The sport is enjoyed by more people than golf and tennis combined,” Matz says, quoting a statistic he saw in a fishing magazine.

Now that he's helped many of those people improve their take, he's getting panicky calls when people misplace their Snap'r. “They call and say they've lost their talent,” Matz says. They were back in the 90 percentile of anglers, and they didn't like it.
To get to this stage of the product's development, the Matzes sold their house in Riverside, Matz worked an extra 30 hours a week on top of his regular day job, they invested the money they made off their house, and they've learned a lot about legal stuff. “Writing the patent was a big feat to overcome,” he says. This is his first time as an inventor. Inventing was never in his game plan.

But now with the knowledge there are nearly 44 million anglers in America alone, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Matz feels he's on to something big. Almost as big as the trout Madelyn caught with a Snap'r on her Barbie fishing reel: a 5.5 pound whopper.

For more information about the Snap'r, visit snaprco.com, or stop by any of the Big Bear retailers that carry fishing supplies, Big Bear Sporting Goods, Boulder Bay Market & Sporting Goods, Lakeview Market, L&H Market, Our Town Liquor and Lighthouse Marina.
http://www.bigbeargrizzly.net/articles/2006/08/16/news/business/snapr.txt