Web design for a fly fishing gear business

One of the things I have enjoyed the most about working on websites is how sometimes a project ends up pulling me into a world I knew almost nothing about before. PLUMA was definitely one of those.

I grew up on an island in the Caribbean, so fishing as an activity was never something completely foreign to me. It was part of the environment and something you would naturally see around you, but my idea of fishing was very different. I associated it much more with boats, heat, the sea and this practical or commercial activity that in some ways always felt closer to hunting.

Then I started working on a website for a company selling feathers for fly tying and found this completely different side of fishing.

At first I was obviously learning because I needed to understand the products. Marabou, hackle, saddles, different colors, different feathers, why one material moves a certain way in the water and why somebody who actually knows what they are doing would choose one over another. But after a while I wasn't researching only because I needed to finish a website anymore. I was actually interested.

That led me into fly tying videos, old shops, rivers, guides, different traditions and eventually the small fishing documentaries I started finding on YouTube. I remember watching things like Miracle of the Mountains from Frequent Flyers Fishing and Iconic Rises, and I think that was where the contrast really clicked for me.

It was still fishing, but the whole rhythm around it felt completely different from the one I had in my head. Cold rivers, mountains, somebody standing in the same piece of water for hours, people tying something by hand before going out, generations of knowledge around materials and places that seem to mean something very specific to the people who fish there.

I also became really interested in how that culture is filmed. Studios like Off the Grid and filmmakers around the fly fishing world don't just point a camera at somebody catching a fish. A lot of the best stuff is about everything around it: the landscape, the drive there, the weather, the small objects, the preparation, the people and the reason they keep coming back.

Aesthetically I loved that too. There is something really beautiful about how quiet a lot of it is.

And I think working on PLUMA became much more enjoyable once I started seeing the feathers as part of that bigger world instead of simply products that needed to exist on an ecommerce website. There was craft behind them, history behind them and a whole culture on the other side that I was slowly getting introduced to.

I still know very little about fly fishing compared with somebody who has spent their life around it, and that's probably part of why I liked the project so much. I got to come into it from the outside, be curious, learn enough to start noticing things I would have completely ignored before and somehow turn that curiosity into work.

I'd genuinely love to work with another fly fishing, fishing gear or outdoor brand at some point. Not because I suddenly became a fisherman, but because there are certain industries where the product is only a small part of what makes the world interesting, and this definitely felt like one of them.