Are we being ripped off by foreign flies?
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“DEAR SIRS,” the e-mail started, “My name is Reginald Kibugi, and I am seeking to sell you excellent-quality fishing flies.” My cursor hovered over the Spam button, but the next line made me hesitate: “My asking price is $3 per dozen.” That’s a quarter a fly. Was this a good deal? A bad deal? I didn’t know, and chances are, you’ve received similar e-mails, if not this very one, and you don’t know either.
In order to answer that question, you have to know a bit about the world of commercial fly-tying, and that means you need some history. Back in the 1970s, an American professional fly tier named Dennis Black was driving from shop to shop to peddle his wares. On one of his long road trips across the West, he had an epiphany: He might be better off supervising other tiers than doing all the work on his own.
However, Black recognized that in order to build a company around high-quality fishing flies, he needed a workforce willing to toil for lower wages (by American standards), with an aptitude for detail and a cultural pride in doing the same job well over and over again. He ultimately set up shop in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand, and called his company Umpqua Feather Merchants. Umpqua’s operation was the first of its kind, and it has been successfully copied many times since.
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