BIDDEFORD, Maine — Find your grandfather’s tackle box, poke around for a bit, and you’re likely to find a small, fish-shaped lure you’ve never seen before.
Cast it, and you might catch a fish. Retrieve it, and it’ll wiggle back and forth, enticing a strike.
Look in any Gen-X’er’s tackle box, and you may not find anything that resembles the once-iconic Al’s Goldfish. The lure virtually disappeared after founder Al Stuart’s death in the late 1970s, when the company went in a different direction. The most recent owner, a fan of the product before purchasing the company, cultivated a small but loyal regional following.
But after buying the Al’s Goldfish Lure Co. in 2015 and moving it to Maine a year ago, another Gen X’er, 41-year-old Mike Lee, is trying to reintroduce that fishing lure — and other new products — to a fishing clientele who might view it as the next big (new?) thing.
“When I meet people in [a certain] age group — mid-50s and older — there’s this huge pull and draw. [They say] ‘I used this product in my childhood. I used this all the time,’” Lee said from the company’s Biddeford headquarters. “I meet people like this all the time, up and down the East Coast. But when you get to Gen X, they say, ‘What’s that?’”
Thus, the big challenge from the ambitious Lee.
“I have to introduce a legacy product, a very good product, as a new product,” he said.
Lee explains that Al’s Goldfish, originally known as Stuart’s Goldfish and patented in 1951, became very popular in large part because of Stuart’s affiliation with Gaddabout Gaddis, the legendary “Flying Fisherman,” who hosted a TV show in the early days of television.
“[Gaddis] started working with Al Stuart in the mid-’50s, when he was doing some radio and back when TV was literally a hard line from a TV station to your house,” Lee said. “Once he started going more regional, there were no marketing tools, so they started selling lure kits, at cost, on the show.”
The effort wasn’t really designed to sell lures. Instead, it was envisioned as a way to track viewers: When the lure orders came in from various cities, it allowed TV execs to track the show’s coverage and popularity.
And the show — and Al’s Goldfish — turned out to be very popular.
“From everything I can find, he was selling somewhere in the area of a million units of the Goldfish a year, for probably 20 years,” Lee said. “To put that in perspective I don’t think there are a handful of lures out there that could do that today. Period.”
Lee, a lifelong Mainer, became aware of Al’s Goldfish Lure Co. the new-fashioned way: He browsed a popular Internet website and found it up for sale.
“I found the business on a Craigslist ad,” Lee said. “I had been looking at businesses [to purchase] and I had come close to buying a few things and nothing really fit right. And when I started doing the research, I said, ‘Wow. Why didn’t I know about this?’ It had a huge national base, but its roots were in New England.”
Lee’s background is in manufacturing, and he had a good job as a senior finance and accounting director at a multinational company. In 2011, while working on a project for the firm, he started paying closer attention to the number of young Mainers who couldn’t find jobs in their home state.
That’s when he decided to try to become part of the solution and started to purchase a company of his own, which he would locate in Maine.
Lee said one of Al’s Goldfish’s selling points is that it’s remarkably simple to use.
“You cast, and you retrieve. You can’t mess it up, unless you hook onto something,” he said. “That makes them great for young anglers. And [some models] are colorful, so they’re visually attractive.”
Another positive: They work.
“What I firmly believe is different [from some other lures] is, it is a balanced spoon,” Lee said. “The way that it’s cut and contoured, a traditional lure will flop side to side, but then it will start to spin. The spinning action can twist lines, and doesn’t represent a true fish movement. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work — the spoon has been around since the Civil War — but what Al’s Goldfish tends to do is rock side to side and minimize spinning. So it looks like a fish actually swimming through the water.”
Among the new products Lee has introduced are the “Living Lure” line, which is exactly what it sounds like: The lures are vividly colored and look like actual bait fish.
Lee said initial reaction to his reintroduction effort has been strong. The previous owners had virtually stopped marketing the lures and had switched focus to other products. Lee said Al’s Goldfish products already are in three Bass Pro Shop stores and 10 Cabela’s locations.
“What’s been interesting is that the product didn’t go in until late June last year, which is arguably past the season’s peak,” Lee said. “But the sales in the Bass Pro in Foxborough, Massachusetts, in the offseason, beat what they’d expect for an annual [total].”
Al’s Goldfish retail for $4 to $5 for small freshwater lures and $6.50 to $8 for larger and saltwater lures.
The lures are competitively priced, Lee said, and he’s confident fishing consumers won’t pinch pennies when looking for the tools they’ll use on the water.
That’s gratifying to him, especially because he’s determined to avoid outsourcing work to foreign countries as he builds his company.
“I bought this because I wanted to do something local. Personally, I took a huge financial risk, and I want to do something that creates jobs here,” he said. “And I firmly believe that when it comes to this customer base, which is very localized and takes pride in their country, they’re willing to pay an extra 50 or 75 cents to be patriotic.”
