About Arbogast
About Fred Arbogast Company
Fred Arbogast founded his company in 1930. What had begun years earlier as just a hobby had slowly developed into a business and a few years before formally founding the Fred Arbogast Company, Fred made the decision to resign from his job at Goodyear to work on lures full time.
The Spin Tail Kicker was Arbogast’s first commercially manufactured lure. The lure was made of tin, not wood and could be modified manually by bending the lure and thereby change how it acted in the water. The Tin Liz, a variation of the Spin Tail Kicker was successfully launched soon afterwards.
Next in line for Arbogast was another successful lure, the Hawaiian Wiggler. This innovative lure featured a hula skirt. This flexible rubber skirt was such a successful new idea that Arbogast quickly patented it in 1938. The skirt, which gave the appearance of lifelike action, was a significant contribution to lure design. A few years later, the related Hula Popper, a topwater lure, was introduced as the first topwater lure to have a hula skirt.
An avid angler himself, Fred Arbogast was also a world champion bait caster, winning the national championship in 1922, 1923 and 1924. He also broke the world’s long-distance casting record of 250 feet in 1924. This passion for the sport of fishing carried over into his lure design.
Fred Arbogast loved fishing and each lure he made was developed to address a specific fishing condition or environment he had personally experienced. Over the course of his career in developing fishing lures, he developed eleven different lure designs. To the current day, many of the lures still in the Arbogast catalog are variations of these original designs.
