WILSON’S has a new fly fishing travel program which is aimed at putting more money back in our customer’s pockets. You pay the same rate whether you book a trip direct with a lodge or through our store but because we are a retailer we are paid a referral not available to the general public. Our travel program simply turns the lion’s share of that referral back to our customers. Again, the price is the same whether you book direct with a lodge or book through us but if you book through WILSON’S we give you a gift certificate to spend in our store worth 10% of the trip value.

This program also applies to any guide that you book through our fly shop. If you are interested in going to a lodge or booking a guide who is not yet on our program please let us know because we can call them and see if they will participate and if they do we will give you the gift certificate out of a non-refundable deposit. If the lodge or guides chooses to not participate we will let you know and you will pay the same rate as you originally planned but without the benefit of receiving the gift certificate from WILSON’S. It’s that simple !

As the guy on the bank commercials says, “Why not save your money ?”

WILSON’S has been offering Ontario’s best Fly Fishing School program for 11 years and we are pleased to announce that our 2009 school will be held at the Glen Haffy Fly Fishing Club in Caledon.

Owned and operated by the Toronto & Region Conservation Authority, the Glen Haffy Fly Fishing Club is on the same property as the Glen Haffy Conservation Area but is privately accessed off of Centreville Creek Road. Our 1 day beginner schools are held on Saturdays from May through October and teach all of the basics and our follow up “On Stream Instruction” half-day classes are held on Sundays. Please check out the Education section of our website for further details.

Being a small fly shop in a competitive industry we have always been conscious of our pricing and make sure that it is the best available. However, we still read an occasional comment on local chat boards that because we are located in the downtown core of Canada’s largest city we have higher costs so the pricing in our store is higher than what can be found in other Ontario fly shops. As far as pricing is concerned nothing could be further from the truth.

Our pricing policy states that if you find the same product in another fly shop at a lesser regular price we won’t match it – we will beat that price by an additional 10% of the difference ! This policy does not apply to any fly shop in Ontario or Canada – it applies to any fly shop. Period. We have been doing this for 2 years and encourage people to do their homework because we want to earn the right to be your fly shop of choice and it starts with having the best pricing available.

Any time we change our prices upward we do our homework to ensure we are at worst the same as our competitors. To that end we are considering raising the price of our flies and have been doing our homework to see what pricing is available in other shops. Yesterday I was in the local ‘big box retailer’ to do market research and was shocked to see the same flies we sell from the same manufacturer priced 30% higher than at our fly shop (not 3% – the difference is 30%!). If we increase our pricing to the level we are contemplating ($2.50 minimum) the flies we sell in our store will still be 20% less than at the big box retailer !

Don’t take our word for it – we encourage you to do your own homework. We are confident that our pricing and selection is by far the best in Ontario and some of the best available in North America.

We currently promote over 2 dozen lodges from Alaska to Argentina and right across Canada and are in the process of identifying other quality destinations that we think might be of interest to our customers. The price points range from what we would term an ‘entry level’ trip to 5 star lodges and the focus of many of these lodges is often defined solely by the fishing available. We encourage you to take a moment to look through our list of destinations because there is an announcement coming…

For the first time in the history of our store we are having a ‘Spring Cleaning Sale’ with 20% off all inventory in the store. This sale only goes until March 31 so plan on making it down to our store to check it out as quickly as possible !