It is with great enthusiasm that I am writing to tell you about Lateral Line . Lateral Line is a company that I started with my brother, Spencer, over two years ago with the goal of making a technical year-round fishing clothing system for striped bass anglers. We have been working on the company for over two years on the “down-low” sourcing supplies, designing concepts behind our clothing system and working on our business plan. We have kept a relatively low profile because of the competitive landscape and the tendency of companies in the outdoor apparel market to copy one another.

The idea behind Lateral Line’s year-round clothing system is that we striped bass anglers do not have a clothing brand to serve our fishing clothing needs for the year-round fishing that we do. We are always forced to mix and match different clothing brands with different pieces to make due for the weather conditions that we chase stripers. Most all the brands that make some fishing clothing do not put fishing on the forefront, but rather as a second sport they serve to help grow their revenue, it’s a business decision for them, not a passion. Some of the brands stand for the general outdoors, some are outdoor retail stores that put their name on generic designed clothing, some are specialty companies that serve the ski, climbing, and surfing markets, but none serve anglers first, are true clothing companies and genuinely make and design clothing with the angler’s needs in mind. We decided it was time to change that and created Lateral Line. As an example of what our year round system encompasses; when we make one fishing shirt, we make three for the four seasons. One for summer conditions, one for spring/fall and one for winter. In our fishing shirt system we have the Crisfield Fishing Shirt for summer conditions, our Susquehanna Fishing Shirt for spring/fall conditions and our Choptank Fishing Shirt for winter conditions. We are in the process of making the same sort of system for base layers, soft shells, hard shells, fishing pants, and all of our other fishing clothing.

As many people in the TidalFish.com community know I am very involved and an advocate of fisheries conservation and sustainable fishing practices. This philosophy overflows to my brother Spencer’s beliefs as well. With this in mind we wanted the Lateral Line brand to continually be giving back to the fish to assure we have some to catch in the future. To accomplish this we have committed 2% of Lateral Line’s gross revenue, in what we call our “2% for the Fish” program, to a non-profit Lateral Line Foundation that we created. The foundation’s goal is to fund research and fisheries initiatives that leverage grass roots fisheries conservation efforts that get anglers involved helping and in touch with the resource.

Lateral Line has a few products already out and more then 40 in the design pipeline:

The Crisfield Fishing Shirt
The first of a series of three fishing shirts for the four seasons. A lot of thought went into the design of this shirt from input from a lot of professional anglers as well as passionate hardcore recreational anglers. You can read all about functions, features, and thought process here

The Miles Technical T-Shirt
This t-shirt is not your regular run of the mill t-shirt, it was designed to be rugged and keep you dry. This is the first in the series of three technical shirts.


Lateral Line Signature Fishing Hat
Our first in the series of three fishing hats, our Lateral Line Signature Fishing Hat is designed for Spring/Fall and all around wear. Spencer designed the cap to fit well as soon as you take it out of the package.


How this fits in with TidalFish.com and how it affects you
I feel like the TidalFish.com community is family, with that comes some responsibility to keep everyone what is going on since without you there would be no Tidal Fish. So here is goes… TidalFish.com has been a part-time personal labor of love for me since 2001 when WorldwideAngler.com came to an end and I launched this site. TidalFish.com generates revenue from advertising, classifieds, sales of TidalFish.com gear and through the generous support of members who become supporting subscribers (that I greatly appreciate). However, it does not generate enough to pay anyone full time and I do not take even a part time salary. We have a CTO who handles the majority of the programming which I can not do and he watches over the servers. He only works part-time, but it does require some loot every month to retain him.

TidalFish.com continues to grow through grass roots word of mouth; the site currently has over 45,900 registered fishermen and fisherwomen. Given our size the site requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth which adds up very quickly as well as what is starting to become a small server farm to keep it up and running. Long and short, Tidal Fish covers most of it’s expenses, what it does not cover I have always personally funded. I love fishing and everything about the sport and since closing the doors at WorldwideAngler.com have always wanted to find a way to be able to be back in the fishing business fulltime. Below is a quick snap shop of how I arrived where I am today:

After WorldwideAngler.com ended in 2001 I co-founded a non-profit foundation called Marine Ventures Foundation with my best friend and one of my business partners in Worldwide Angler, Tom McMurray (long time TF members, do not confuse with Tom Gattone who also used to be a partner at WWA and Tidal Fish, but who is no longer with us). Tom’s vision was to create a private foundation where the focus was fish (saltwater as well as coldwater). The reasoning was simple: Tom and I had a passion for it and the fish needed something like Tom envisioned. The environment receives only 6.3% of total foundation grant dollars in the United States, Marine funding represents only one-half of 1% (0.05%) of the total funding that is devoted to land and animal protection. Of this 0.05%, only a small fraction goes to actual “fish” conservation, research and habitat restoration. Tom had the means to fund it and for about ten months I worked on it full-time. Tom and I currently still run and operate the foundation which gives several hundred thousand dollars a year away to fisheries conservation. During this time I also completed my Masters in Psychology which I had took a leave of absence from to build WorldwideAngler.com.

From Marine Ventures I went into the Venture Capital industry investing in internet, software, and consumer product companies, I did a short stop at America Online (AOL) helping to develop new businesses, and then went back into venture capital working for a firm where we invested in enterprise software. During the time I was at AOL I started an international MBA program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I continued this program while at venture capital firm. During this time it was becoming clear that while my aspiration had always been to be a venture capitalist, my entrepreneurial roots were calling along with the freedom that being an entrepreneur affords a person to be able to own your time and arrange it in my case so I could fish more. I also realized that living on my Blackberry during my 9 mile drive to and from work in northern Virginia, that took anywhere from 45 minutes to 1.5hrs to go one way, was just not a way I wanted to live my life. I would return home on the weekends to visit Ivette in our home in Easton and I can never recall a Monday morning at 5am when I ever wanted to get back in the car and drive back to northern Virginia. I believe in a balance between mind, body and spirit. So in March of 2005 I left the venture firm with the mission of figuring out how and what I was going to do to get back in the fishing business while finishing my MBA program in which I graduated in May of 2005.

I looked at ramping TidalFish.com up, but decided that while I love the internet and technology what I really wanted to do was make and build a tangible product. In addition, in order to ramp up Tidal Fish as a business I would have needed to stick ads all of the site, I just could not get comfortable with this as I thought it comprised the reason I ever started a site back in last 1995.

My brother Spencer and I had always done side things together and always wanted to do a business together. Spencer is as big a fishermen as I am and we starting kicking around ideas. One Fall afternoon, while on one of our regular fishing trips fishing for striped bass in the middle Chesapeake Bay, Spencer and I were taking a break for lunch and shooting the stuff when we literally counted ourselves wearing over twelve (12) clothing brands to outfit a "fishing clothing system" for ourselves. Surprisingly, analyzing what we were wearing we discovered most of the clothing was neither designed nor tested for people who fish. Having to wear ski pants to fish simply made no sense to us, yet that was our only option "for best in class" clothing for that time of year. It quickly became apparent to us there was no fishing brand for striper fishermen nor any brand that made a system of year round clothing for anglers like ourselves who fish year round, if there was we would have been wearing it. We decided we would create a company that developed a system of technical year-round fishing clothing built specifically for hardcore striped bass anglers. Spencer spawned the Lateral Line name and we have been at it ever since.

I hope that Lateral Line provides you with a true technical year-round fishing clothing system. I am also asking for your help in building the company. While I would love you to buy Lateral Line fishing clothing (all Tidal Fish Subscribers will receive a discount on all Lateral Line clothes), I also ask that you get involved with the design process and give feedback, and suggestions. I will be asking for your feedback and input on how, of what and what features etc Lateral Line fishing clothing should have. While we fish a lot, we know there are a ton of TidalFish.com anglers who fish and have great ideas about what fishing clothing should have.

My full time pursuit of Lateral Line will hopefully only make TidalFish.com better. TidalFish.com will operate on the revenue it generates to keep it going, but will also be able to be supported by the clothing side of the business since Lateral Line, Inc owns TidalFish.com (I and Spencer own Lateral Line, Inc). This will make TidalFish.com better since we will be able to add new features and functions at a little faster rate since helping TidalFish.com helps the Lateral Line brand and vice versa.

If you have any questions or anything feel free to email me at: BrandonW@TidalFish.com or call me at 410-310-7051. I have put together a group of links below with more information on Lateral Line and other things I mentioned above.

Thanks for all the support!

Brandon

More information on Lateral Line, Inc.
Lateral Line Site
About Lateral Line
About our "2% For the Fish" Fisheries Conservation Foundation
Lateral Line History
Lateral Line Company Team
Lateral Line Philosophy
How Brandon and Spencer Arrived at Lateral Line - Blog Entry
What is a" Lateral Line" in a Fish

Past Fishing Blog Entries Here