‘Mid-range? Follow these three steps now or lose it all’

Suppliers in the middle are being squeezed out of the market in Europe, says Nash’s former Head of Commercial, Jocelyn Dupré, who has watched the market rapidly change from his position developing Nash in multiple markets across the region. There is a way out, but as this insightful interview makes clear, it won’t be easy.

Mid-sized tackle brands in Europe are feeling the squeeze, and not only in your area of expertise, the carp market, and not only from Asian competitors. Can you explain what you see happening?

JD: Well, first the competitive pressure on mid-sized tackle brands is far more complex than just low-cost Asian imports. What we are witnessing instead is a structural polarisation of the market into two distinct extremes, leaving the middle ground completely exposed.

Take carp. At the top end, premium brands like Korda, Fox, Nash, Trakker and Solar thrive because they have the scale and margins required to invest heavily in product innovation and direct-to-consumer digital marketing. In today’s landscape, digital marketing is the sole engine that drives consumer demand and ensures survival.

Meanwhile, at the bottom end budget competition has intensified through two major phenomena. As we know, direct e-commerce platforms such as TEMU and AliExpress have made direct-from-factory purchasing seamless for end-consumers, including product designs that are easily copied. Then there is what we can call the Low Barrier to Entrepreneurship. Just as we saw a surge in boutique bait companies years ago when rolling equipment became widely accessible, sourcing tackle hardware has now been completely democratised. Via platforms like Alibaba, virtually anyone can connect with Asian manufacturers, order samples and launch a micro-brand overnight. 

Caught between high-budget marketing powerhouses and an influx of low-barrier budget operators, mid-sized tackle brands face far more than just falling sales. They are caught in a structural margin squeeze, lacking the marketing budget to drive consumer pull at retail yet unable to match the rock-bottom pricing of direct-to-consumer budget platforms. As a result, a market that was historically fragmented is rapidly consolidating around these two extremes.

How fast is the clock ticking for these mid-sized brands?

While predicting the future is always challenging, it is clear that the next five years will be decisive and will fundamentally reshape the European tackle brand landscape. We are heading toward a double-sided structural shift. Caught in the crossfire, traditional mid-sized brands will face rapid erosion, with many fading into irrelevance or disappearing altogether unless they radically reinvent their business model.

How will a business know it needs to act? What would you say are the warning signs that it is facing big trouble?

The warning signs for a business in this sector rarely appear as a sudden drop in overall turnover; instead, they manifest as subtle, structural friction points across sales and operations. The earliest red flag is a sharp decline in pre-orders, signaling that retailers are no longer willing to carry inventory that lacks strong direct consumer demand. This is almost immediately accompanied by a growing reliance on trade discounts and clearance sales to maintain revenue, which systematically erodes gross margins. Operationally, these businesses suffer from an aging customer base, a digital presence that fails to engage younger anglers on visual platforms and heavy reliance on generic Asian supplier catalogues rather than proprietary product development.

And what kind of businesses are most at risk, would you say?

The business profile most at risk is the legacy mid-sized generalist. These companies historically built their success on all-encompassing product catalogues – covering everything from terminal tackle and rods to bivvies and luggage – supported by traditional sales representatives and strong dealer networks. In today’s market, this ‘one-stop-shop’ approach is a structural trap. Lacking the massive marketing budgets required to dominate high-margin aspirational categories like premium leaders do, and without the ultra-lean cost structure essential to compete with direct-to-consumer budget platforms, these mid-tier generalists get squeezed from both ends.

When a historical mid-market brand tries to maintain a presence on every front without a distinct digital identity or clear product specialisation, it loses its core reason to exist. Retailers begin cherry-picking only a handful of fast-moving SKUs, leaving the brand with stagnant warehouse inventory and fixed overheads that rapidly outpace gross profit. Without a radical shift toward direct digital content creation or tight category focus, these businesses inevitably enter a terminal spiral of margin compression and commercial irrelevance.

So what choices do such businesses have if they want to survive? 

To survive the mid-market squeeze, a legacy brand cannot simply optimise its current playbook; it must execute a decisive structural shift. Three core strategic levers can restore sustainable margins and rebuild market relevance. The first lever is deep specialisation. Rather than maintaining an all-encompassing, increasingly unsustainable catalogue, the business must rationalise its product range by 60% to 80% and focus strictly on categories where it holds genuine authority, technical heritage or proprietary design. By abandoning low-margin commodity lines and high-overhead hardware, it transitions from a generic supplier into an undisputed niche expert. This lean scale yields higher gross margins and enables sharp, highly targeted storytelling.

And the second lever?

The second lever is transforming the business into a direct digital media publisher. To ensure survival, the brand must take full control of end-consumer demand. This requires reallocating capital away from legacy trade shows, print catalogues and broad sales rep networks into high-calibre, direct-to-consumer digital video production and field storytelling. By driving strong organic demand directly from anglers, the brand creates a natural pull that forces retailers to keep its products on shelves, restoring its distribution leverage.

And third?

The third lever rests on modernising operations and distribution. Mid-sized brands must aggressively lower fixed overheads to match modern margin realities. This involves adopting a hybrid distribution model – combining direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels for high-margin soft goods or specialised accessories with a tight, selective retail partner network for core hardware. Operationally, it means moving away from off-the-shelf catalogue sourcing toward proprietary tooling and flexible supply chain management, ensuring products cannot be easily cloned by direct budget platforms.

Why a hybrid model and not fully D2C?

Looking at parallel passion industries like premium cycling or outdoor equipment, a pure Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) model often proves to be a financial trap. Relying strictly on direct digital channels requires continuous, massive marketing expenditure to acquire each customer, which quickly eats away at the margins gained by bypassing traditional retail.

Established local retailers remain irreplaceable: they provide a crucial physical touchpoint, immediate technical credibility and local post-sales service, acting as authentic brand advocates on the ground. In parallel, an agile D2C platform captures high-margin complementary sales and engages digitally native consumers. Combining a selective physical retail network with a controlled direct-to-consumer channel is the only sustainable way to build long-term brand equity without over-leveraging marketing budgets.

Is there any cause to be optimistic? Can you define a world where a broad, mid-priced tackle brand still succeeds? 

Yes, a broad, mid-priced brand can still succeed – provided it completely abandons the traditional wholesaler mindset to become an agile, connected ecosystem grounded in the modern era. The decline of the mid-market is not an inevitable industrial fate; it is simply the natural penalty for a lack of strategic vision.

The future belongs neither to pure financiers who view angling strictly through spreadsheet metrics, nor to legacy brands frozen in past habits. It belongs to leaders capable of building a solid bridge between global manufacturing power, agile supply chain management and ultra-local cultural resonance. By combining a revitalised network of selective retail partners, a sharp direct-to-consumer digital platform and authentic field storytelling, a broad-range brand can do far more than merely survive – it can once again become the beating heart of the angling community.

This transformation is demanding, but it presents a remarkable opportunity for reinvention. For leaders who know how to synthesise operational rigor with genuine field passion, the European market is not a threat, but an exceptional landscape ready to be reclaimed.

• Jocelyn Dupré is the former Head of Commercial at Nash Group (UK & EU) where he led the business’s growth across 16+ European territories. Prior to that, he was the group’s Sales and Marketing Manager for the whole of Europe.