Fisherman Landed Big One by Inventing, Selling Lure

MINNETONKA, Minn. —  It all began in the 1930s with a fisherman’s observation: Big fish eat little fish, especially little fish that are wounded.

As Lauri Rapala fished the cold, clear waters of Lake Paijanne in central Finland, he watched repeatedly as a predator fish would dash into a school of minnows and grab the one that swam with a slightly off-center wobble.

Rapala thought that if he could craft an artificial lure that mimicked the movements of a wounded minnow, he could catch more fish, earn more money and not be constantly baiting lines.

Rapala came up with a little invention that is today considered the Mercedes of fishing lures. It anchors a multinational public company that produces 20 million lures a year and is based in Minnesota and Europe.

Rapala’s first successful lure, crafted of cork and tinfoil coated with melted photographic negatives, hit the water in 1936. A lip attached to the bottom of the lure created the wobbling action.

In the years that followed, Rapala and his four sons made and tested the lures--switching from cork to pine bark to balsa and gradually mechanizing parts of the process. Word of the lure began to spread.

But it took American salesmanship and a best-selling issue of Life magazine to capture worldwide attention for the Rapala lure. Rapala (pronounced RAP’-uh-luh) is now the core brand of Rapala Normark Group, a company that grew out of a collaboration between the lure’s inventor, who died in 1974, and Minnesota fishing tackle wholesaler Ron Weber, who stumbled upon the lure in 1959 while fishing in Ontario.

Weber and his fishing buddies weren’t having much luck until one of the men, Al Wallin, tied on a lure sent to him by an uncle in Finland. Wallin started hauling in walleyes and Weber himself was hooked.

“It’s not every day that I get outfished,” Weber said. “When I saw my friend catching fish after fish, I became a believer on the spot. There was something different about this particular lure.”

When Weber returned home to Minneapolis, he wrote to the Rapala company in Finland and asked for 500 lures. By the time the lures arrived in early 1960, Weber had forged a partnership with Ray Ostrom, who owned a sporting goods store. They sent another letter to Finland asking for an exclusive contract to distribute the lures throughout the United States.

The lures were selling well in the Midwest when Life reporter Marshall Smith visited Minneapolis to do a story on the Minnesota Vikings, the state’s new NFL team. Smith heard about the Rapala lure and Life sent a reporter and photographer to Finland to interview Lauri Rapala.

The story, “A Lure Fish Can’t Pass Up,” appeared in the Aug. 17, 1962 issue of Life, the magazine’s biggest-selling issue of all time. It was right after the death of Marilyn Monroe, and a picture of the actress was on the cover.

Readers who bought the magazine found out about Rapala, and the company was overwhelmed with phone calls and letters from anglers wanting to try the lure.

“To create a national demand overnight was a problem,” Weber recalled. The company couldn’t meet the demand and retailers were charging $25 or more for the lures. Knockoffs began appearing.

Weber made his first trip to Finland and loaned $10,000 to the Rapala family to build a factory. The loan was repaid within two years and the company has continued to grow.

The Rapala brand, with prices ranging from about $5 to $25, now includes about 1,000 different lures ranging from tiny lures for freshwater fish to lures nearly a foot long for deep-sea fishing. This year, the company introduced a lure specifically for squid.

Rapala Normark sells another 1,500 different lures under its Blue Fox brand and about 600 under its Storm brand.

In 1990, two years after Weber bought out his partner, the Rapala company purchased Weber’s business, which was then responsible for close to 50% of Rapala sales worldwide. The Rapala family sold its stake in Rapala Normark between 1995 and 1997, and the company went public in December 1998. Shares are traded on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

The original lure design, with 2 million sold annually in several sizes and colors, remains the best seller but the company expects to sell more than a million annually of each new lure design introduced.

The company’s net sales have soared from $20 million in 1990 to about $111 million for the fiscal year that ended July 31, said Jorma Kasslin, chief executive. Rapala Normark earned $7.5 million in its last fiscal year.

Computers are now used to design the lures, but prototypes are individually made and field-tested before a lure goes into production and every lure off the line is still hand-tuned and tank-tested before it is boxed for sale.

“That will be our strategy 100% in the future. It’s ruling our company. That’s why people are catching fish with our lures,” Kasslin said.