Our Story

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Knowing What's Worth Keeping

Holding fast to tradition in angling since 1955.

Seventy years of fly fishing in St. Louis, and a standard that still has to be earned.

Fly fishing has never been easier to get into, and it has never been harder to sort out. There is more gear than there has ever been, more instruction, more opinion, and all of it arrives faster than anyone can reasonably filter. Most of that is good news. Some of it just makes it harder to tell the difference between what is genuinely better and what is simply newer.

The water hasn't changed, though. Neither have the fish, or the fundamentals that put a fly in front of them. That is the part we have spent seventy years paying attention to.

St. Louis, 1955

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Feather Craft opened in St. Louis in 1955, back when good fly-tying materials were scarce and reliable information about them was scarcer still. The idea behind the shop was not complicated: anglers deserved better materials, better equipment, and better answers than the market was giving them.

Ed Story set that tone early. He built the place on precision, curiosity, and constant experimentation, and on a refusal to sell anything he couldn't stand behind. That culture has outlasted every other thing about the business, and it still runs through the shop today.

What began as a small mail-order operation grew into one of the best-known independent fly shops in the country, and into a gathering place for anglers in St. Louis and well beyond it.

The Catalog

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We were never only selling gear. Our catalog became a large part of the reason why. It was known for its technical depth, its distinctive voice, and its willingness to explain the details rather than talk around them. Long before product reviews, forums, and social media, it put practical information directly into the hands of people who wanted to get better.

We have never stood apart from the sport's evolution, either. We helped shape a piece of it, from materials and techniques to fly patterns like the Crackleback, which anglers are still tying and still catching fish on.

Carrying It Forward

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For decades, Bob Story carried that tradition and built Feather Craft into the shop that generations of anglers came to know. Bob is still part of Feather Craft, and the experience and stories from those years are still part of who we are.

But a business with this much history can't survive on preservation alone. The way an angler researches a rod, learns a technique, finds a material, or picks a stretch of water looks nothing like it did a few decades ago. A customer who once waited on a catalog can now compare a dozen products in a few minutes.

In 2024, Jeff Mace purchased Feather Craft. The goal was never to reinvent it. It was to make sure Feather Craft could keep being Feather Craft, which meant protecting what seventy years of anglers built here while updating the parts of the business that customers rightly expect us to update. Better inventory accuracy. Better product information. Faster shipping. Easier access to the knowledge that used to live behind the counter or inside the pages of the catalog.

The tools have changed. The standard has not.

What We Still Believe

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An independent fly shop should know what it sells. Someone should answer the phone. A product description should help you decide something instead of filling a page. And there is still real value in a shop where the people fish the rods, tie with the materials, and can tell you plainly where the difference is and where there isn't one. Every rod, reel, line, hook, vise, and feather we carry still has to earn its place.

Fly fishing isn't random. It's a system. Water, insect, fish, equipment, presentation, and angler are all connected, and once you understand how, results start to repeat. Ignore those relationships and you're guessing.

So the job stays the same as it has always been: filter out the noise, clarify what matters, find what works, and pass it down. We'll keep adopting better tools and better materials as they arrive. We just won't confuse change with progress.

Over time an angler changes, from reacting to understanding, from trying to knowing, from hoping to executing. That is what we're here to help build. Anglers who see clearly, decide with purpose, and trust what they know because they've watched it hold.

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Feather Craft · Est. 1955