Double Up Tacke Co.
Handmade Soft plastic Fishing Lures
This business started out in the garage. Me my friend Mike saw a listing on Facebook marketplace for bait making materials. We bought it to make baits for ourselves and quickly realized how much fun it was to make and design our own lures. In fishing, Double Up means when two people catch fish at the same time. We wanted to hold this as one of our values, remembering to enjoy fishing for what it is; being with your friends and spending time with loved ones. After establishing this, we made the decision to sign up for our first industry expo and everything began.
We designed our logo and got right to baitmaking. The show was at the end of the break, and we had the entire break to make 3000 bags worth of plastics. That’s over 24,000 individual pieces. And we were ready. We made baits from 6am- 10pm everyday, stopping to eat and use the bathroom. We wanted it so bad. After many, many hours in the garage, we finally did it. The baits were made and it was showtime!
Single unit production cost: $1.72 ($3.35 with minimum wage incorporated for us)
Selling Price: $6
We made it to the first expo and it went fantastic! To bring in customers, we did a build a bag – pick any 8 baits and a scent for 7 dollars – something no one has done before, and it worked great. Taking the risk paid off and our first show was a great success. Our booth positioning brought us plenty of foot traffic and kept customers near our shop.
Our second Expo was not as good; our positioning was far from the entrance on a wall, so we got roughly 30% of the foot traffic we did in the first expo. Instead of letting that bring us down, we used this time to make connections and talk with other booths, landing our first in with a store in Rock Cut State Park! We got 30 of our bags in at 30% margin and it worked phenomenally, having the owner place another order for 50 the following month and staying consistent at that. We made the best of it, having an ROI of 11.8% of our initial investment which we were happy about for our first year. Below you’ll find some connections we made with some pros during this expo.
During the summer of 2025, we worked hard to sponsor local high schools and fisherman in the area. We currently sponsor 4 highschools, 1 college, and 3 individuals with our lures, providing them with cheaper, more durable soft plastics every time they fish. I decided to move on from Double Up in pursuit of bigger ideas with Bait Makers United.