The High Point

If you measure it in noise, the peak is easy to point to. The Shoal Tent launched in October 2017, the world's first floating tent, no poles, fully inflatable, made for sleeping right on the water. It was supposed to be a small, fun product. It went a different direction almost immediately.

Videos of it picked up more than 20 million combined views on Facebook alone. Sales ran triple what we'd estimated at launch. It got picked up everywhere, national outlets, viral aggregators, outdoor and design press, the kind of coverage a small gear company in Troy, Ohio has no real way to plan for or predict. It just took off.

A person relaxing inside a SmithFly Shoal Tent while another paddleboards past

But that's not actually the peak, not the real one.

The real peak was quieter than any of that, and it happened one drift boat at a time. Some of the best fly fishing guides in the business started running the rafts day in and day out on real water, real clients, real conditions. People would fish with a guide who happened to be in one, get out at the end of the day, and say some version of the same thing: I need to get one of these. It was affordable. It stored easily. It was light enough to row without wearing you out. For a lot of people, it made drift boat style fly fishing possible for the first time, something that used to require a much bigger investment or a much bigger truck.

An angler standing and casting from a SmithFly raft on a river

Two anglers fishing from a SmithFly raft along a tree-lined river

And then, over and over, unprompted, people would tell me the same thing: the best day of their year was in that raft. Taking their dad out. Taking their kids. A family, a group of old friends, a day on the water that became the day they talked about for the rest of the season. That's not a sales metric. Nobody can put that on a spreadsheet. But it's the actual answer to what twelve years of this was for.

Two people carrying a lightweight SmithFly raft down to the water — Light enough to carry in, which was the whole point.

The virality was fun. It sold a lot of tents and it put SmithFly in front of people who'd never have found it otherwise. The guides and the families in the rafts, that's the part worth being proud of. That's the high point.

It's also true that the same demand that created all of this is part of what eventually broke it. Growing faster than a small manufacturer can actually keep up with is its own kind of problem, and some of the people who ordered during that stretch are the same people who never got their boat. Both things happened. The best days on the water were real. So was the damage on the way down. The next chapter is about that part.