Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED
Photos courtesy of Dive Bomb Industries
Dive Bomb Industries has taken the waterfowl industry by storm. Offering high quality silhouettes in anything from wigeon to honkers, to apparel and field accessories. With direct-to-consumer pricing, it’s little wonder that they’ve been able to create such a successful dynamic. With their silhouettes becoming more and more popular each season, Cody Stokes and the Dive Bomb team have set out to add even more versatility to their line-up by creating a new floater duck decoy. Split Reed had the chance to talk to Forrest Carpenter, Pilot of the famous “Dive Bomb One”, and member of the Dive Bomb team to get a review of the new F1 Mallards.
SR: Why did Dive Bomb decide to get into the floating decoy market?
Forrest: Well we’re all duck hunters. All of us enjoy getting out and hunting over water, and I think we realized that as good as our silhouettes are, they don’t float very well (laughs). We just wanted to be able to offer the same thing we do with our silhouettes. We saw an opportunity to offer a high quality product without the price that comes with most floaters. By being direct-to-consumer, which you’ll hear everyone at Dive Bomb talk about, we’re able to sell decoys at the lowest possible price. We don’t have to deal with retailers, mark-ups, or any of those sorts of things. It was just an obvious opportunity for us, and thanks to Cody [Stokes]’ direction, it’s one of those things that came together nicely. Once we got the carver sorted out and saw some of the work that he was doing, it was amazing. It all just really came together.
SR: Dive Bomb has taken over the silhouette industry, but was it harder to get into the floater market where things are a bit more saturated?
Forrest: I don’t think it was difficult to get into the market, but there was a bit of skepticism from our buyers initially; just because they know us as a two-dimensional decoy company. Which is fair- you know? You haven’t seen that sort of decoy from us. But we’ve got a lot of stuff in the works that aren’t necessarily two-dimensional, and really aren’t even decoy related at some points. So there was a little bit of that hurdle to get over, but once the first few people started to get these decoys shipped to them and started taking them out of the box and posting pictures on Facebook or Instagram and all over social media, people jumped on board really quickly. People seemed to be thrilled to death with the quality of them, and as people are going through their first season with them, they’ll see the durability in them that we saw when we were testing them.
