AnglerSurvey.com has just released its latest angler trends media report, covering May-June 2013. The results are captured in the graphic below.

It’s interesting but should be obvious that the top two types of items purchased are flies and tippets. Those are basically consumables that have to be replaced as previous purchases are used up (tippets) or lost (flies). Rods and reels in comparison represent about one-third the percentage purchases of flies and tippets. That’s to be expected given the several orders of magnitude (100X) differences in price. What wasn’t reported, at least in the publicly available report, was where those items are purchased.

The perceptions of many commentators I’ve read, and believe, is that most purchases of flies and tippets are done locally, but many purchases of rods and reels are done online, where prices are better, taxes are avoided, or there’s something free thrown in (e.g., a fly line on a reel). The challenge for local fly shops is to capture as much of those 20% of sales (rods and reels) as possible. Or we will soon lose more local business – in this case our local fly shops.