Ocean State Tackle owner Dave Henault is a hands-on manager, the kind who doesn’t think twice about telling a reporter to hold on the phone a minute while he finishes “giving some crabs a drink of water.”
During the last six years he has grown his original 420-square-foot Smith Hill location in Providence into a three-store chain, with a customer base that reaches into Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Henault a few years ago undertook an advertising campaign that urged customers to call and ask for him personally. Of course, too many customers took advantage. Some would call to chat. Others would call at the busiest times of day just to check the tides, calls Henault would sometimes dismiss with a snide remark.
“But it was all in good fun – that’s the type of business this is,” Henault said last month. “Sometimes I get to be crass.”
During the last six years, Henault has expanded his advertising to include radio, television and print ads, spending more than $200,000 in total. This year, he’ll spend about $70,000 to, among other things, advertise for his new Coventry store.
There are about 30 outdoor advertisements for his stores – most at bus shelters, including two in downtown Providence – that are seen by as many as 400,000 a day, he said.
Each year, Henault airs a commercial – mostly on early-morning news and weather stations and fishing shows – that runs between 1,500 and 1,700 a year. This year, he’ll bump that up to 3,700 runs, he said. “If a guy’s going fishing in the morning, he went to bed before the 11 p.m. news,” Henault said. In the morning, “you’ve got about 15 or 20 minutes to grab their attention” before they leave the house.
But advertising is only as good as the product being pitched. And Henault is proud of his strong product line.
Ocean State Tackle processes all its own baits, more than many other shops, he said. Among Ocean State’s most popular baits are freshly-ground pogies, live eels and frozen clam bellies. “When we first started doing brine pogies and we only had one store, I had people coming from Westerly and Little Compton to come buy those baits by the cooler-full,” he said.
This year he’ll be offering clam-necks for the first time. Fishermen can be fickle when it comes to new offerings, “but we’re as cutting edge as you can be in such a simple business,” he said. “We have different baits for different applications and different fish. We carry and unbelievably extensive inventory.”
And the depth of products that Henault offers is another draw. “We’re not a boutique,” he said. “That’s what’s made us so successful. We have $17 combinations all the way up to $1,680 rod-and-reels that you can piece together.”
That each store is open 103 hours a week during the summer is another draw. The shops open at 5 a.m. everyday. “Sometimes I can do $500 in half-an-hour at that time, because that’s when boat customers come in, as a rule,” he said. “But that business is very weather-dependent.”
Henault’s newest store, in the Centre for New England development in Coventry, opened May 30.
Henault hopes he can capitalize with that store on the boating traffic that heads south on Interstate 95 and Route 4. “Those anglers are traveling to Charlestown, to Westerly,” he said. “People think Coventry is a freshwater market, but there’s also a very high percentage of people who have 18- to 21-foot boats that they trailer there. Rhode Island Saltwater Anglers was started by a group in Coventry.”
The new store will have a different atmosphere than the other two smaller stores.
The other stores are in residential communities, so a Coventry shopping center with a 22,000-car-per-day traffic pattern will be a departure for Ocean State Tackle.
At about 1,200-square-feet, it is almost three times larger than the Providence store. And the Providence store has lower ceilings, causing some rods there to be displayed horizontally.
“But in this new store, we’ll be able to put rods up to [10 feet 6 inches tall] standing straight up on a rack,” Henault said.
He’s also bought a second-hand, 30-foot island from recently-closed Alpha-Omega watch company in Cambridge, Mass. Those glass cases would have cost about $35,000 new, but Henault paid only about $5,000. Now the glass cases display fishing gear instead of watches that cost tens of thousands of dollars
“You’re going to walk into this store and you’re not going to believe it,” he said. •
company profile: Ocean State Tackle
Owner: Dave Henault
Type of Business: Bait and tackle shop
Location: 430 Branch Ave., Providence; 208 Gooding St., Bristol; 735 Centre for New England Blvd., Coventry.
Number of Employees: 5
Year Established: 2002
Annual Sales: WND
