Bob's Flies: What We Learned From Our Own Shop

Inventory, returns, advertising budgets that don't pay off. What having your own shop teaches you about consulting, and what consulting doesn't teach you about shops.

Why we have our own shop

Bob’s Flies is my fly fishing business. It sells hand-tied flies, a few selected pieces of equipment, courses, and guiding services. The original reason for this shop was as a side hustle. The reason we keep it is different: it's our test lab.

Everything we recommend to clients, we test here first. New payment providers, new ad channels, new email automations, new Shopify themes, new reporting setups. If it works here, we recommend it. If not, we save clients the detour.

Lesson 1: Inventory is a timing problem

There are fly patterns that sell all year round. Others only sell for two weeks in June. We tried for a long time to solve this with classic inventory management: minimum stock, reorder points, safety buffers. That works for standard goods. For seasonal goods, it doesn't.

What works: pre-orders. We list seasonal patterns with "Available from" and a specific date. Customers pre-order, and we tie accordingly. The inventory pressure is gone, and the margin increases because we have no shortages and no overstocks. We are now transferring this logic to clients with similarly seasonal products.

Lesson 2: Returns are a matter of prior information

Our return rate is under 2%. That's unusually low for an online shop. The reason is not the quality (which also has to be good), but the prior information. Each product page shows: which pattern (with detailed photo), which sizes are available, which tying, for which conditions recommended. Customers know what they're getting before they buy.

In a client project with an online shop for equipment, the return rate was 15%. After the same detailed treatment of the product pages (more photos, clearer size specifications, application context), it fell to 6%. This has a direct effect on the margin, without a single franc more in advertising.

Lesson 3: Advertising budget that doesn't pay off

Meta Ads for flies are expensive. The target audience is small, buyers are specific, and the average shopping cart is under CHF 80. We tried to scale with Meta for a long time. It never really paid off, even though the reports looked good. Only when we systematically reduced the advertising budget and instead invested in SEO and a weekly newsletter did the numbers turn positive.

This was an uncomfortable realization because we do Meta Ads for clients. But for niche products with a low shopping cart value and a highly specialized target audience, Meta is often not the right tool. We bring this insight into every initial conversation: we first check whether Meta makes sense for the specific case at all before setting it up.