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Fresh Allure: Owner of fly-fishing shop is always changing
offerings to catch interest
By Fran Daniel
JOURNAL REPORTER
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Gordon talks fly-fishing with David Havens, who's been going on the trips for
years.
Gordon talks fly-fishing with David Havens, who's been going on the trips for
years.
(Journal Photo by Jennifer Rotenizer)
Customers of The Green Drake in Winston-Salem sometimes tell owner Stewart
Gordon that he has it made now that his fly-fishing store has survived seven
years in business.
But for Gordon, it’s all about reinventing himself, constantly.
“You have to continue to work hard at it,” he said. “If you don’t, somebody
will come in and try to take your place.”
A big part of The Green Drake’s reinvention efforts have focused on exotic
fly-fishing trips to such places as Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and the Bahamas
since 2003. The high-end specialty shop has a fly-fishing school and has
expanded its class offerings.
“We’ll do some saltwater fly-tying classes,” Gordon said. “We’ll do classes
for smallmouth bass.”
The Green Drake’s trips, school and classes have helped the store’s bottom
line, and Gordon says he believes that his efforts have also benefited the
fishing industry.
Nationally, fishing and hunting have declined in popularity in recent years.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there was a 12 percent
decline in fishermen and a 4 percent drop in hunters nationwide from 2001 to
2006.
“A lot of the problem is because access to places to go to fish and hunt is
disappearing,” Gordon said. “Urban sprawl is a big part of it, and a lot of
properties have fallen into private hands.”
David Havens of Lewisville has been a customer at The Green Drake at
Stratford Place and gone on its trips for at least five years.
Havens, who is a financial adviser for UBS Financial Services in
Winston-Salem, started fly-fishing after meeting Gordon and shopping at his
store.
“I found that fly-fishing in general is not just about the quantity of fish
caught,” he said. “It’s about the whole outdoor experience, if you like the
outdoors and like an escape from your daily routine.”
Havens said he believes that part of the reason for the decline in people who
hunt and fish is that peoples’ lifestyles have changed over the years.
“We don’t wake up at 4 in the morning to go work the field all day, eat lunch
at 10 o’clock, dinner at 6 (o’clock) and then go to bed,” he said.
Gordon said that the only way to expand the sport of fly-fishing is by
teaching it to children, the middle-aged and older people.
“It doesn’t matter what age they are,” he said.
Gordon, 37, started fly-fishing when he was 7, while living in Laurinburg.
“I grew up fishing for bass and bream,” he said.
He lived in Colorado for a while, then moved back to North Carolina in 1995.
He worked for a family business in Lenoir before opening The Green Drake with
his wife, Anne, in 2000 at 123 S. Stratford Road.
He named the store after his favorite fly pattern. The Green Drake is a type
of mayfly that is a favorite of trout and known by anglers for its hatches.
“When you see a hatch, it’s like a swarm of bees,” Gordon said. “There are
just thousands of them.”
The store offers a variety of fly-fishing gear, men’s clothing, travel
luggage and gifts that focus on an outdoor lifestyle. Brands include Orvis,
Filson and Simms.
The store carries hundreds of fly patterns, a quarter of which are tied in
the store.
“We pride ourselves on keeping a good selection of flies, whether they are
for saltwater, trout or freshwater.” he said.
The store’s fly-fishing school is a two-day event. Most of its classes are
one-day trips to such places as the Smith and Dan rivers in Virginia and to
Helton Creek in Ashe County. The next big, exotic trip will be in January to
Andros Island in the Bahamas.
The basic gear for a fly-fisherman is a rod, reel, fly line and flies.
The cost at The Green Drake is $230 to $1,300, but the average sale is $230
to $550, Gordon said.
He declined to give sales numbers but said that business has increased each
year, except for 2002, and that sales rose 8 percent to 10 percent in 2006
from 2005.
His biggest competitor is online stores that sell fly-fishing gear.
To compete, Gordon provides one-on-one service and makes special orders for
customers.
The store also provides free shipping on special orders to give customers a
reason to come into the store rather than shop online.
“We try to underpromise and overdeliver,” Gordon said.
For example, he said, during the Christmas season, when shoppers come in at
the last minute looking for a particular item that the store does not have,
employees will do their best to find it for them before the holiday.
The Green Drake has a Web site at http://thegreendrake.com that it uses for
posting photos of its trips and information but does not use it for commerce.
“We have a stream report that we update weekly to tell people what streams
are fishing well,” Gordon said.
Fran Daniel can be reached at 727-7366 or at fdaniel@wsjournal.com |
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