For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with fishing.
Which is remarkable coming from a family where nobody else but me had any interest in fishing.
There is something about the world underneath the water’s surface, coupled with the primal reaction of catching a fish and the objectively cool fishing gear, that is forever improving.
Fishing as a whole interests me to no end.
When I was 12 years old, I got my first “job” in the fishing industry.
I was helping around on the weekend at the biggest tacklestore (back then) in the Netherlands.
Job is in quotations, because I don’t think I ever signed a contract or had a real workschedule.
On the weekend I would ride my bicycle by myself 11 kilometers (one way) to the store, to help out the staff wherever I could.
It didn’t matter what it was, sweeping floors, get coffee, run to the back to grabs some gear for a customer.
I loved being in that store.
Hearing the fishing stories from other fishermen, the typical smell in the air when you walked in, the way the staff interacted with me and the customers.
Once I got a little bit older, they hired me as a part time employee until the company eventually went out of business a few years later.
2 years after the other company went under, I found a new job in a tacklestore as a full time employee.
My childhood dream of becoming a full time employee in a tacklestore was fulfilled.
This store (at the this time that I worked there) was the biggest in the Country and the stock was levels above the store I had worked before.
It was there that I got my first introduction to high-end fishing gear.
As I started to own and fish with the high-end gear, I noticed rather quickly that with the rods I was fishing things which I would’ve like to see differently.
This to me was the start of another chapter of my career in the fishing industry, rodbuilding.
In the summer of 2018 I started looking up how I could make atlerations to the rods myself and I rather quickly fell into the rabbit hole of rodbuilding.
I started to read books about it, join forums and rodbuilding groups a like, to learn all I could about the subject.
The intention was never to make a business out of it, I just wanted to build the best rods I could. Which would perform, feel and look better then the rods I previously owned.
After 3 years of rodbuilding, a buddy of mine asked me to build him a rod and for a couple of months I kept rejecting his request as I wanted to only build for myself.
He kept persisting however and after quite some time I gave in. I built him a rod in exchange for money and didn’t think much of it at the time.
Started building it and once it was almost done, I got a message from another guy. He heard I was working on a rod for my friend and he wanted one too.
I accepted his project too and from there, more and more people caught wind of my rods.
The amount of people that expressed interest in my rods grew very quickly since that day.
It got to a point where I ether had to make a business out of it or stop building rods. So at the start of 2022 I founded “Ramon’s Rods” and have been building rods ever since.
The rest is history.
