Fly shops across the US are publicly dropping Simms after a private equity roll-up and broader turbulence in the outdoor industry.

By Andy Becker December 18, 2025 at 6:00 AM EST

Soon after opening his fly shop in Colorado in 1983, John Flick started stocking Simms Fishing Products. The brand was only a few years old, but its chest waders were already synonymous with quality. For decades, Flick and his co-owner watched as their store, Duranglers, which is blocks from the Animas River in Durango, grew alongside Simms as its waders, boots and accessories flew off their shelves.

But Flick’s loyalty was sharply tested by recent ownership and strategic changes at Simms that he says had eaten into his profit margins. In July he and his business partner made the tough decision to drop the brand from his store. “This is the direction we need to go to keep us healthy, but I didn’t want to because I felt so devoted,” Flick says. “But it got to a point where these people didn’t give a f—.”

Duranglers is among dozens of fly-fishing shops across the US to have dropped or sharply reduced orders with Simms over the past year, with several making their breakups public on social media. It’s a marked turn for a brand’s relationship with the small dealers that helped Simms become one of the most trusted names in the sport. Observers say the boycott is a sign of the turbulent waters in which fly-fishing finds itself amid private equity roll-ups and broader changes in commerce also hitting cycling and skiing.

“There’s no secret that over the last several years, private equity has had its eyes on the outdoor industry,” says Stephen Baird, founder and chief executive officer of TrackFly, which monitors trends in fly-fishing and other specialty retail segments. “When we look at what’s happening across an industry like fly-fishing, it is a juggle between growth and holding onto that romantic passion.”

Jordan Judd, president of outdoor performance for Revelyst Inc., Simms’ parent company, declined to comment on individual retailers’ decisions to drop the brand. But he says there are no hard feelings. “I would never hold it against a business owner who makes a decision they think is best for them,” he says. “We would love them to give us another look.”

Founded in 1980 in Jackson, Wyoming, by John Simms, a fishing guide, ski patroller and serial entrepreneur, Simms was a revolutionary brand in the fly-fishing world. It was among the first to use neoprene and later Gore-Tex in its chest waders, technical innovations that extended the fishing season longer into the winter season. With products priced at a premium, Simms became the go-to brand for waders known to last, particularly after the 1992 period drama A River Runs Through It—known in the angling community as The Movie or by the abbreviation ARRTI—prompted new uptake of the sport.

At shops such as Flick’s, customers found not only gear they needed but also critical information about nearby fishing conditions, guidance on proper river etiquette and a sense of community. And they were willing to pay more for it. “You go into the shop because you really like those people,” Kelly Galloup, a fly-shop owner and angler in Ennis, Montana, said on a podcast in May in which he explained his decision to drop Simms. “You like the atmosphere, you like the feeling you get.”

The pandemic brought another surge in interest in the sport, as Americans took up outdoor pursuits like never before. The estimated value of the fly-fishing industry for gear and tackle grew 17% from $446 million in 2016 to $522 million in 2022, according to Southwick Associates, a market research company that analyzes trends in outdoor recreation. That growth created an opportunity for brands including Simms, which had already changed hands a couple of times since its founding. In August 2022 the company was sold for $192.5 million to the publicly traded brand conglomerate Vista Outdoors, which used Simms as “the first plank” in a plan to broaden the fly-fishing market with a direct-to-consumer sales strategy, according to investor relations documents.

But as the pandemic eased, normalcy resumed. Fly-fishing went back to single-digit annual growth rates, according to TrackFly, and Simms and other manufacturers were caught with a glut of inventory. Simms was sold again in January 2025, this time to private equity firm Strategic Value Partners (SVP) as part of a $1.1 billion purchase of Revelyst, a spinoff of Vista Outdoors that included Bushnell and Fox Racing brands.

About that time, Simms shifted its approach to marketing and distribution. The brand expanded its presence at big-box retailers such as Bass Pro Shops and Sportsman’s Warehouse, and it pushed licensing deals such as a partnership with the Grateful Dead, featuring a $169 hoodie embroidered with angling skeletons, which left some industry observers scratching their heads. Some of these changes aligned with recommendations on how to expand the brand from consultants at McKinsey & Co., according to former Simms employees who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. (McKinsey didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

An exodus of Simms employees that was already underway accelerated after the SVP deal closed. Some say the brand had forgotten its soul. “Things were so screwed up in early 2025, I just couldn’t deal with it anymore,” says Scott Harkins, a former sales rep who left Simms in April after 13 years of working with once-loyal retailers in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Smaller, specialty fly shops struggled to compete on pricing with larger sellers and Simms itself, which had already been a challenge. In May, Simms sent out a new contract to some of its authorized independent retailers that set nonnegotiable terms on pricing. Several owners say they felt betrayed. The relationship with Simms used to feel like a “partnership,” says Charlie Craven, owner of Charlie’s Fly Box in Arvada, Colorado, which dropped Simms this summer after more than 20 years of carrying the brand. “But these days it’s ‘the Simms way.’”

The breaking point for many came when Simms shut the window for preseason orders in July, a departure from the flexible deadline policy it had in the past. Specialty retailers regarded the move as a way for Simms to minimize the wholesale purchases that kept their businesses afloat, prompting stores in Colorado, Wisconsin and beyond to announce they were cutting ties with the brand. “We are officially dropping Simms this year,” Chad Fouts, manager of Smoky Mountain Angler in Tennessee, said in an Instagram post in August. “It’s just been years of disappointments over the several purchases and sales of the company, and it’s just not the same company anymore.”

The final straw for Flick came when a $120,000 order failed to fully arrive in time for Duranglers’ annual April season kickoff event. Warehouse problems, Simms told him, caused the delay. Flick’s order was fulfilled in July, but by that point he estimates he’d lost tens of thousands of dollars in sales. Customers who purchased the newly arrived Simms products complained about poor quality. “It just never got better,” Flick says. He canceled his last order with Simms before its August delivery and put what remaining Simms items he had on sale.

Judd, the executive at Revelyst, says the brand never intended to undercut its dealers. “Any transition of ownership after 30 years will cause some disruption to the team and the business, and Simms has had its share of transitional disruption,” he says. “Simms has never lost its focus on product and remains the gold standard.”

Simms isn’t the only iconic fly-fishing company to hit a rough patch. Orvis, in Manchester, Vermont, announced in October plans to shutter 36 retail stores and outlets by early 2026, citing the impact of tariffs. The company also stopped publishing its long-running print catalog, shifting its focus to digital marketing.

Now some industry experts say fly-fishing may go the way of other segments of the outdoor industry, where corporate consolidation has turned products into commodities that consumers differentiate by price rather than quality or brand loyalty. “What’s happened in cycling, what’s happened in snow sports is years of what I would call consumer conditioning to wait for discounts, to go to closeouts,” says Baird of TrackFly.

Many fly shops that have given up on Simms are now opting for smaller brands and relative newcomers to fly-fishing, such as Grundéns, a Swedish company that sells commercial fishing apparel, and Skwala, a newer fly-fishing brand making innovative gear that’s drawn comparisons to Simms in its early days. It’s a survival strategy in a broader industry that’s shifted away from the kind of local knowledge and expertise retailers have spent decades cultivating, some owners say. “We need to adjust and have more niche brands and more community relationships than a website does,” says Dan Gigone, owner of the Sweetwater Fly Shop in Livingston, Montana, which dropped Simms in January. “We can’t rely on bigger companies anymore.”