Steve Knight

It has been decades since Tyler's Creme Lure was the unchallenged leader in the soft plastic bait industry.

Competition has been cutthroat for decades for the almost 60-year-old company that produced the first soft plastic worm.

The story is legend. Rubber worms had been on the market for 50 years when the late Nick Creme Sr., began tinkering with the new-fangled vinyl plastics in the basement of his family's Akron, Ohio, home. Using his wife Cosma's pots and pans, it wasn't long before Creme turned out a product that was recently named in a survey by the American Sportfishing Association as one of the 10 most influential fishing products created over the past 75 years.

At one point, Creme Lure was to bass fishing what Schlitz was to beer. It was by far the biggest name in the industry. Neither is the case anymore.

Because of the demand for his product in the South where the invention of bass boats and torrent of reservoir construction made bass fishing an industry, Creme moved his company to Tyler in 1960. The company was sold to Tyler's Knight Manufacturing in 1989, which continues to manufacture Creme's worms using many of Creme's original molds and equipment.

Today the soft plastic worm business isn't the same mom-and-pop operation it was in Creme's time. For decades there has been competition with major companies such as Berkley and Culprit.

There are others that enter the market as repackagers, companies without facilities or equipment that have their baits made by someone else then package them for sale. These companies flood the market with new, discounted products, many of them little more than knockoffs of others' designs.

"That is the problem," said Wayne Kent, Creme's president. "The marketplace is complicated by the five-year-cycle companies that enter the business with all the excitement and they just disappear. There product has to be absorbed somewhere."

Unlike in the era where Nick Creme sold worms in whatever quantity a bait stand or locally owned sporting goods ordered, about 75 percent of the products the company makes today are sold to big box sporting goods stores like Bass Pro Shops, Cabelas, Gander Mountain, Academy and Dick's. And the contracts are on a cycle that guarantees the stores a price as far out as 18 months.

At the same time, Creme is feeling a bump in the prices it pays just like everyone else in America.

"Our liquid plastics are up about 23 percent. Our packaging is up by 5 percent. Our boxes are up over 10 percent and we are getting a fuel surcharge on all of our freight inbound and outbound of 25 percent," Kent explained.

Those are tough numbers to crunch in an industry where profit margins hold at about 5 or 6 percent.

One hedge is to regularly turn out new baits that weren't priced into the last package sold to retailers. Creme is just now hitting retail shelves with a product called the FishFrog. It is the latest incarnation of the soft plastic, top water frog that has been popular with anglers now for several summers.

With tens of thousands of dollars involved in the design develop, the key to the FishFrog, like any other manufacturers' mid-season introduction is that it has to be able to catch fishermen as well as fish to be successful.

"They have to be good and really unique," Kent said. "The FishFrog fits into that criteria. When Mike Clark tried to sell me on a frog, I said there are already eight others out there. We would not have come out with them had he not come up with this new concept."

Another reason for product introduction throughout the year is to prevent pirating of ideas by overseas' manufacturers.

"We have had to cut down our response time from the time we show them until they are in the store. When we used to show a product in July for putting them in the store in January we were at their mercy," Kent said, referring to those who knock off their products.

Another factor Creme would have never imagined having to deal with was the very retailers he sells to going overseas and developing private label lines that they sell next to other manufacturers at a discounted cost. That creates one more level of competition for consumers' dollars in an industry where figuring out how to attract and retain customers is next to impossible.

It might seem strange to contemplate, but a company as important to fishing as Creme might have never existed had it faced the challenges of today's business climate.

"The requirements to get in are raised. From $1 to $2 million in product liability is required on your products and you are required to have an exit strategy. It used to be that if a product didn't sell it was eaten by the retailer. That is not done any more. It is the responsibility of the retailer to figure out how to get it out of the stores," said Kent, whose company remains a family run operation.

The fishing tackle industry has gone through a wave of mergers, bankruptcies and failures. Even for a company that once dominated the industry; the fishing tackle business is one of the toughest to survive.

"We are holding our own," Kent said. "I don't know that anyone is gaining."

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Contact Outdoor Editor Steve Knight at 903-596-6277 or by e-mail at outdoor@tylerpaper.com

HOW GOOD IS GOOD?: Wayne Kent (left), president of Creme Lure, talks with his son and company vice president Chris Kent about the company’s new FishFrog. The company operates in a competitive environment that may have kept original founder Nick Creme from getting started.
(Staff Photo By Steve Knight)