A Proposal for Matt's Rigs

Ahead of any engagement our team has reviewed the enquiry thread, the intake form, the discovery call notes, the Matt's Rigs brochure, and both faces of the clamshell packaging artwork. The physical samples and the 2D drawings will be reviewed on receipt by the Shield Works R&D team.

What follows is not the Phase 1 output. It is the position our engineering work starts from, set out here so the scope and the value of Phase 1 are clear before any commitment is made. This is a simple product to make and a demanding product to make identically. There are also two points, one in the materials and one on the packaging, that will decide where this product can legally be sold and used in your own market. All three are worth being open about at the outset.

Every rig carries a termination at the swivel, two weight positions on the loop, and two hook attachments. Tied by hand, the maker corrects as he goes: a crimp gets an extra squeeze, a wrap gets an extra turn, a weight gets nudged. None of that survives a production line. In a factory, judgement has to be replaced by a fixture, a specified termination, and a measurable standard the product is tested against.

So the question Phase 1 answers is this. What is the assembly method, the fixture, and the acceptance standard that gives every one of 400,000 rigs the same breaking strain, the same hook geometry, and the same loop dimension as the ones you tie yourself? This matters more on this product than on most. Your customer is a derby angler who loses a fish because a crimp slipped, and that is the customer least likely to forgive it and most likely to tell everyone.

Hook supply sits inside the same question. Treble hook wire gauge, temper and point finish vary enormously across the supply base, and dropping hook grade is the quickest way to make a unit cost target and lose the customer at the same time. Hook supplier qualification, with a point penetration and hook straightening test, is part of this workstream rather than an afterthought.

One commitment on this, because it matters more than anything else in this document. The most important thing we intend to protect is that the factory version still behaves like the rig you tested yourself on the water. The engineering here exists to reproduce the product you have already proven, not to redesign it into something different. Where we recommend a change, it will be because a component or a method cannot be held consistently at volume, and we will tell you what the change is and why before it is made.

This one needs raising before a weight supplier is committed or a first order placed, because it changes the bill of materials and the unit cost.

Both weights on the rig are 1/4 oz, roughly 7 g each. If they are lead, then in Canada the rig cannot lawfully be in an angler's possession while fishing in national park waters or national wildlife areas, where the restriction covers lead sinkers and jigs below 50 g. Several US states run their own restrictions, with New Hampshire, Maine and New York among those legislating at or around the 1 oz mark. Non-lead alternatives are established in tin, bismuth, steel and tungsten. They sink differently, they feel different on the cast, and they cost more than lead.

We are not going to pick your material for you inside a proposal. What Phase 1 does is establish the real options, what each does to your unit cost at your volumes, what each does to the action and sink rate of the rig, and what a national retailer will expect to see on a product of this type. That gives you a decision made on numbers rather than on assumption, taken before tooling and before a first production order.

The clamshell format is the right call and it matches how comparable products sell off a peg. Two points on the card itself.

First, Canadian requirements for prepackaged consumer products call for the product identity and the net quantity to appear in both English and French, with the dealer name and address permitted in one language. The current artwork is English only, and Quebec applies further language requirements on top. If a national retailer such as Canadian Tire is the target, this is caught at vendor onboarding rather than at the till, and it is a great deal cheaper to fix before the print plates are made.

Second, a clamshell holding two exposed treble hooks is a packaging engineering problem, not just a print job. The hooks have to be retained so they cannot shift inside the pack, cannot pierce the film in transit, and cannot present a hazard to a customer handling the pack on the peg. That drives the thermoform cavity geometry and the card die line.

Phase 1 delivers the clamshell and card specification and a written gap list against the labelling requirements. Artwork production and translation are not part of it.

One further point on packaging that is worth raising before you assume a cost. Tackle clamshells are produced in a range of standard stock sizes, and a stock pack that fits the rig properly and retains the hooks safely avoids a custom thermoform tool altogether. A custom tool gives a better fit and a more distinctive pack, but it is a capital cost at the point in the program where your capital is tightest. Phase 1 assesses both routes and prices both, so you commit to a custom tool only if it earns its cost. We would rather find you a stock pack that works than sell you a tool you do not need.

Launching all 4 versions at once means 4 sets of components, 4 clamshell cavities, and 4 blocks of first-order stock, at exactly the point where capital is tightest.

Our recommendation is that Phase 1 specifies all 4 versions, so the family is engineered once and priced once, and that you launch with 2. On the price points and species coverage in your brochure, Pike and Walleye look like the pair that carries the range. The remaining 2 then drop in later off the same components, the same assembly fixture and the same tool family, with no re-engineering and no second specification exercise. You keep the full range on the brochure and you commit stock to half of it.

Phase 1 is the first paid engineering engagement in the Matt's Rigs program. It converts a proven handmade product into a defined manufacturing package, and it puts a real, supplier-backed price per rig in front of you at each of your volume tiers.

One thing worth being explicit about. The purpose of Phase 1 is not to push this product into production regardless. It is to establish whether there is a technically and commercially viable route forward before larger money is committed. If the work shows that your USD 1.00 target cannot be reached at a 10,000 unit first run, or that a non-lead weight changes the cost picture materially, we will tell you that plainly and set out what would need to change. Finding that out for USD 5,000 is a considerably better outcome than finding it out after tooling is cut and stock is bought.

Phase 1 is delivered by the Shield Works R&D team, led by Sourya Ghosh, Head of R&D, who has an aerospace engineering background, working alongside Mark Jacobs and C2W sourcing and commercial engineering resources.

Fee: USD 5,000.

Duration: approximately 6 working weeks from confirmation and receipt of the physical samples and the 2D drawings. The pacing item is supplier engagement in Deliverable 6, where establishing real component pricing needs proper engineering responses from hook, swivel and weight suppliers rather than headline quotes.

Phase 1 is structured around 6 deliverables, each of which is real engineering or commercial work product, consolidated and issued to you as a single Production Readiness Report.

The Phase 1 fee covers all 6 deliverables in Section 4. The activities below sit outside this engagement. Where they are needed, they are scoped and costed within Phase 1 so you approve them before they happen. Sequencing it this way keeps unnecessary cost out of the early stages.