How a Fly Fishing Brand Reels in Year-Round Growth with Help from AI

It wasn’t until my dad passed that I started reflecting on my life and decided to go rogue and take a turn from my corporate career. While I was sorting his affairs, I found this collection of vintage rods and reels. I never fly fished, but back home, my brother-in-law offered to teach me to cast, and within 20 minutes, I could feel my heart rate slow down. I felt at peace and connected in this profound way.

Soon after, I bought a kit to build my own rod and spent the next week pouring over it. All those hours of building, my work life just disappeared—I was fully present. So I took a month off and built this mini barn in the yard with my dad’s tools as a way of paying homage to him. Then something became clear: I wasn't going back to work. I was going to explore fly fishing, and through this really natural, couldn't-be-repeated process, Maine Fly began—building small-batch rods dedicated to the waterways here in Maine. Then the pandemic hit. Suddenly, fly fishing became popular again, and things just started blowing up.

AI-powered Performance Max helps us refine our ads, and as a result, we're having a record month right now because this one particular ad is dialing in its own audience and giving us about a 1,300% return. With that kind of growth, I don't get a chance to build much at all anymore; I design the rods and I'm running the business from this beautiful mill in Yarmouth, where people can come and watch rods being built and feel part of the craft with us.

Lately, I've been collaborating a lot more with Google Gemini to craft messaging for product descriptions, weekly blog posts, and even the website strategy for our new nonprofit, Repurposed Waders, which is dedicated to keeping waders out of landfills. I had dreaded starting the website process for months, but once I started going through it with Gemini, I had a full content strategy in ten minutes. As a business owner, if you get caught up in operations, that’s where growth stops. Gemini helps me get through my day-to-day more efficiently so I can think about our future.

After seeing the kind of strategizing and forecasting I could do with Gemini, I had it reverse-engineer the process of blank engineering—making bare fishing poles—in the United States and the various costs involved. It gave me this great rundown and even taught me some new terms.

Our goal is long-term sustainability; I'm trying to build something that's here for generations to come. If you rely on placemats and your local diner, you’re going to be a seasonal business. But I built this brand from inception through national presence, knowing the local business would come, too. I know that six months out of the year, there’s going to be snow outside here, and if you want to be relevant, you’ve got to expand your reach. Google AI is helping us do that from every angle—having the right ads in the right quadrants at the right time of year and acting as this incredible strategic partner supporting our growth. All of that combined allows us to thrive year-round, because it’s always fly fishing season for somebody somewhere.