In the world of sports, fishing often takes a back seat overshadowed by more mainstream activities. However, the sheer number of enthusiasts – it’s the second largest sport in the Netherlands after soccer – gives the secondhand market a value of €3bn in Europe alone. It extends to the U.S. too, where 15% of citizens identify as recreational anglers, demonstrating a vast, yet underappreciated, market.

In this podcast episode, Pieter de Jong and Ignacio Vial, co-founders of Recast, a new pan-European secondhand fishing gear marketplace join Emma Herrod to discuss the market potential, platform development, community building and future expansion plans.

The genesis of Recast

Pieter de Jong, known for his fishing illustrations and a rich career in design, realized the lack of a dedicated secondhand marketplace for fishing gear while preparing for a move to Spain. His need to offload gear led to the idea of Recast – a marketplace uniting fragmented markets across Europe.

Ignacio Vial, with 20 years of experience in marketplace dynamics, joined Pieter to bring this vision to life, with their combined expertise setting the stage for a marketplace that caters specifically to the needs of the angling community.

Addressing a fragmented market

Fishing gear sales are currently scattered across various platforms, each limited by regional boundaries and language barriers. This disconnection not only hampers sales but also limits choice for buyers. Recast aims to bridge these gaps with its pan-European marketplace where anglers can connect regardless of their country. To date, “100 % of our transactions have been cross-border,” said Ignacio Vial.

However, Recast is not just about selling gear; it’s about fostering a community that not only meets on the mobile-first marketplace but also embraces an influencer community that’s ready to sell via social channels too.

The business model: Supply-driven growth

The duo’s strategy focuses heavily on supply density, emphasizing the need to attract more listings and engage passionate sellers. The Recast beta version quickly gained traction, showcasing a healthy ratio of sellers to buyers. This initial success indicated that the market was ready for a more seamless, user-friendly solution.

Building community and engagement

A key aspect of Recast’s offering is its community-driven approach. By leveraging Pieter’s existing network of fishing enthusiasts, the platform encourages users to become ambassadors, promoting listings through their social media channels. This not only drives traffic but also builds trust within the community – factors essential for a successful marketplace.

Ignacio shared an exciting feature of their platform – Outposts, a bio link tool that enables ambassadors to showcase their listings directly to their followers. This innovative approach helps sellers reach potential buyers where they already spend their time online, thus enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

Looking ahead: Future growth and expansion

As Recast continues to evolve, the founders are focused on refining their product and expanding their reach. They have opened a pre-seed round to fund growth and enhance their platform’s capabilities, including AI-driven tools to improve user experience. These enhancements will simplify the listing process and tailor product suggestions to individual users, making the platform more intuitive, personalized and user-friendly.

There is also potential for Recast to expand into the U.S. market, driven by interest from both users and investors. Japan is another significant market with its own set of OEMs so connecting these diverse markets could create a robust ecosystem for angling enthusiasts.

“And that’s also where it really gets interesting because there’s a lot of fishing tackle that’s US only, there’s tackle that’s EU only, and there’s tackle that’s Japan only. If all those markets get connected within Recast, we have something that gets really, really interesting and it has real potential to scale,” said Pieter de Jong.

This synopsis of the podcast was generated by AI.

Read, or search, the AI-generated transcript in full below

Emma Herrod (00:02.817)

Hello and welcome to the Recommerce Intelligence podcast. I’m Emma Herrod, one of the editors here at Recommerce Intelligence and I’m joined by two great guests from a new fishing gear marketplace called Recast. So guys, can I ask you both to introduce yourself briefly and what’s brought you to this place and this launch? Pieter, do you want to start?

Pieter (00:29.047)

Yeah, my name is , Pieter de Jong, but I’m also known as Pieter Perch as a non de plume, as a fishing illustrator. I’ve had a career as a design system specialist working for big companies like Philips and the Dutch Railways.

But next to it I always had this alter ego called Pieter Perch to do fishing illustrations and as soon as social media came up this got launched into a super interesting side career because I never figured that people would be interested in my fishing art but then I started posting about it on social media, and fishing brands like Patagonia started to contact me and all of a sudden I had this whole fishing artwork career. So this has led me to work for a lot of the major players in the fishing industry. From tackle design to t-shirts and apparel to lure design, anything that you can imagine. I even designed fishing restaurants.

So then my wife got an offer to have a job in Spain, in Sevilla and I googled fishing Sevilla and I was like yes we’ll move. And which led us to sell off a lot of our stuff in the Netherlands and we are big sellers, resellers of all our belongings. So I sold my furniture on specialized design websites.

My wife sold lot of her clothes on Vinted. So then I stepped into my garage and like every angler my garage was just jam-packed with fishing gear. And I started thinking like why is there no secondhand reseller platform for fishing gear? But I didn’t have time to sell all my gear so it had to move with me to Spain.

And in Spain I started to research.

Around the same time I met Ignacio in a co-working space because we both working in tech, both clearly not from Sevilla, Spain. And we started talking about the project. And this is a good time for you to introduce yourself.

Ignacio Vial (03:00.274)

My name is Ignacio Vial. I’ve got a marketplace background. I’ve worked in venture-backed tech-enabled companies for the past 20 years almost now. I’ve lived in Latin America and North America and Europe, and I’ve scaled different marketplaces amongst those markets. I’ve taken a company that we started out of Chile. I expanded it to multiple markets in Latin America like Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, into Mexico, as well as into Europe.

An Endeavor entrepreneur, I’ve been accelerated by tech stars and then through the course of the adventures of these projects that I’ve worked on, I ended up meeting Pieter a couple years ago and this is how we started off with Recast.

Emma Herrod (03:47.042)

Interesting so Pieter you set up a marketplace to sell all your fishing gear and for the wider market you also mentioned when we were chatting before that fishing is the second biggest sport in the Netherlands after football which is a great achievement

Pieter (04:04.31)

Yeah, I think as a vertical in worldwide, it’s hugely overlooked as a pastime. I think 15 % of all US citizens identifies as a recreational angler. So these are huge numbers of people that are involved in a very passionate pastime, spending all their free time and money on fishing or traveling for fishing.

But it’s completely overlooked. In Europe, for example, it’s very fragmented. An angler in Germany will sell their fishing gear on Kleinanzeigen, which is like German eBay. In the Netherlands, it’s Marktplaats. In France, it’s Daptonleu. But there is no way that someone in Germany will sell their fishing gear to someone in France because the platforms are not connected. There’s a language barrier. And this is a huge problem potential that we saw for connecting those markets together and start selling to each other.

Ignacio Vial (05:13.518)

There’s a 3 billion euro opportunity just in Europe alone if you were able to stitch together all these different fragmented marketplaces. And this is kind of the approach that we had when we looked at it, which was to kind of flip the script on the traditional model that we were seeing, which was hyper niche and regionally niche platforms that were selling specific categories of fishing and saying, hey, we’re going to do this European wide, pan European platform where you can sell any single type of specialty gear, in the fishing vertical. So we’re a generalist inside of the fishing world instead of a hyper niche inside of a niche world as well.

Pieter (05:53.122)

For example, there’s a marketplace in the UK that’s selling vintage, hardy fly fishing reels. Super niche. There’s a fly fishing marketplace in Sweden but nobody is looking at the sport as a total and is only super niche. But we are looking at the wide sport and then we learn through our algorithm what type of angler you are and this is the type of asset that will present to you. So instead of focusing on a niche, we tackle the entire sport.

Emma Herrod (06:28.105)

And do people move between those different sports? Do you have sort of the carp anglers, the sea fishermen or whatever?

Pieter (06:35.511)

Usually anglers are very dedicated to one niche type of angling. A carp angler is not interested in seeing fly fishing content. Fly anglers in special are not interested in any other type of fishing. Then there are fishing nuts like me that are kind of like interdisciplinary anglers I would call myself. And that are really interested in the high-end gear. And this is also what we see reflected on the stuff that’s getting sold on our platform. It’s people that are interested in the higher-end fishing tackle, which means that I’m talking about lures that cost 350 euros, for example, that are only sold in Japan, found their way to Europe, and are now traded in between passionate anglers.

Emma Herrod (07:30.913)

Okay, so you’ve got the combination of the backgrounds, the marketplace experience, UX, knowledge of the fishing experience, love of the sport itself, and you have this idea. So how did you go about bringing it to market, the decision making, the build, and what business model are you following?

Ignacio Vial (07:50.115)

Yeah, when we first got together, we were talking about different types of projects that we had collaborated on in the past. And we were basically, I think, having a beer and chatting about, you know, like what makes a cool platform like this? What works? know, how do you remove barriers? And we kind of specked out the typical, you know, it’s got to come from a community and it’s got to have an important, you know, AOV. It’s got to have a lot of supply that’s floating. And it’s got to be something that’s coming out of like a fragmented community. Right.

And as we’re kind of, I’m kind of spieling on about this, Pieter starts to mention, he’s like, you know, like, this is funny because this is the issue that we have in the secondhand, you know, tackle market here in Europe. It’s super fragmented, blah, blah, blah, blah. So he kind of starts to pitch me on the idea. And I was like, you know, I think it sounds like it’s got legs, but we should probably talk to some people. We went out first and spoke with, you know, people from the influencer segment. spoke with people that came from the publishing houses. We came from, we spoke with people that come from directly from the industry side to understand kind of what the dynamic was between secondhand and OEM. And after having had these conversations, we put out some feelers. So we sent out a couple of surveys to some communities that Pieter runs and is part of, asking questions about their experience of buying and selling secondhand. It was relatively unanimous that it was a bad experience.

It was relatively unanimous that the big winners of where everybody was actually doing this trading was very subpar and people were quite unhappy with it. So we said, if you’re interested, you can give us your email and we’ll follow up with you because we might be doing a project like this. Got a good list of people put together. Put together a beta. We stitched together a couple different license platforms just to see if we could get something up and running. And then we launched with a beta group. It did quite well.

We got a bunch of listings coming on, registrations, we had a bunch of suppliers, with the shops, which is a user that actually sells. And we have the users that we are just typical users that browse and shop. And on the shop side, we were watching, we were seeing this nice three to one ratio. And we thought that was pretty interesting. Listings were popping up and then some transactions started to come through. And that’s when we realized, okay, this is starting to happen.

And then we noticed some other interesting details which was because of the general effect or this general approach that we had the transactions were having in cross-border so 100 % of our transactions have been cross-border. So let’s just say like a list or coming somebody listing from the Netherlands turning around and having the items purchased from somebody that’s in France Or someone listening from France and know listen and being the purchase coming through Germany or even down from the Netherlands or Belgium down into Spain.

And as this happened, we started to then kind of go into the iteration of product saying, how do we understand, like how do we lean into the levers that are working? And this is kind of what Pieter had mentioned before about getting the right supply. So we noticed what supply was coming in. Now we’re starting to push those buttons to say, hey, let’s get some more of this onto the platform. We’re hyper-focused on supply right now. The reality and you know, the typical chicken and egg, what do you get on the platform first? And that supply density is like our core focus. So right now we’re very, you know, supply driven, trying to get that up there on the platform, investing heavily in basically bringing in people that have cool items and working with ambassadors.

And this will speak to the community side. Obviously Pieter has a very, very deep community in this world and everyone is piling in to work with us on our distribution platform called Outposts, which is effectively a bio link tool that we built in and it’s stitched into our platform. So we can offer the bio link to our ambassadors that come in and they have their communities. say, hey, check this out. And then they can say, check out the link in the bio. And the link in the bio has their items that they’re listing, has a promo code. So basically they can get paid on any transaction that happens where their followers or their community uses that promo code. And it gives us this depth, another layer of depth for distribution, right?

So we’re not depending on this whole game of like, okay, let’s just get supply and go chase and then start buying users down the road. The typical approach that we’ve got instead, we’re saying, okay, well, let’s create a distribution layer that is our users. Let them have a platform like a consumer-facing platform that lives where they’re already passing their social time, right? So if they’re on social media, they have a bio link. Let that be a recast bio link where they can kind of push their stuff because they’re looking to sell that gear already.

So if it lives in a marketplace, that’s great. But if they’re talking about it already in their social circles, why not give them a tool to help distribute? And in effect, that helps with us to get to conversion quicker. So this is kind of the direction that we’re going with our product.

Emma Herrod (12:48.161)

Are most of those sellers consumers and therefore you’re building the community in that direction or are they professional sellers or are going after the brands themselves?

Pieter (12:58.964)

It’s a mix of all three I would say. Everybody is a passionate angler, that’s the connecting factor. And then every angler is always looking to upgrade their gear and offload old gear. Then there’s a group of Swinbait JDM Tackle for example that’s produced in Japan that’s hard to get in the Netherlands. Those are sellers on our platform and this is more like the group of professional sellers almost I would say within our platform and then we have brands that are really interested in talking to us because we can share data with them on what if their old stock is still moving really well on our platform and we can help them offload that stock potentially and help them with sustainability programs that they might not have the infrastructure for to handle themselves

Emma Herrod (14:17.697)

So where are you then on the journey? You’ve got the platform built, you’re getting good feedback from the anglers, you’ve got the brands involved as well, you’ve got your communities being built. What’s next in terms of scaling, investment, new countries?

Ignacio Vial (14:31.407)

So we were really focused on squeezing hard on the markets that we’re in. We want to find the categories in all markets that we can feel like we’re actual winners in. On a product level, we’re stable. So we’re happy with the product we’ve got, but we’re actively actually working on a very important iteration. This iteration is basically going to be helping us leverage tools, so AI tools that help us with descriptions, with outreach, with basically creating a simpler user experience for the seller as well as for the shopper and buyer, where we can basically put products that are relevant for them in front of them versus them having to scroll through and doom scroll their way into something that they like or even just like hard search what they like.

On the stage that we’re in right now, we’re bootstrapped. We built this product by ourselves with a small group of friends and family that helped us out at the beginning. then we are looking, we’re opening up a pre-seed round right now. We think it’s the traction, the levers that have been pulled on enough to say, you know what? We think we have something interesting here that we should be, if we throw some fuel on, it can pick up the pace. We actually started having conversations last week. So it’s kind of interesting timing on this.

And the conversations are exciting. We’re getting some traction from the US. Some of the conversations are based in the US, and some of them are here in the EU. And yeah, so we’ll be opening around here, or open with around as of a week ago, actually.

Emma Herrod (16:16.897)

So we might yet see Recast launching in the States.

Ignacio Vial (16:22.201)

There’s definitely a possibility. We’re getting pulled that way. you got to focus and double down on where you see things working, which is our core focus. The interest that we have that’s pulled to the states is from the user side as well as from the investment side. And obviously there are drivers that kind of help influence us to make that decision to go state side. But we very much have it on the radar.

Pieter (16:47.508)

And that’s also where it really gets interesting because there’s a lot of fishing tackle that’s US only, there’s tackle that’s EU only, and there’s tackle that’s Japan only. If all those markets get connected within Recast, we have something that gets really, really interesting and it has really potential to scale.

Ignacio Vial (17:07.129)

We’re dreaming big.

Emma Herrod (17:10.145)

Glad to hear it. So that’s brilliant news amongst building community, building outreach with the brands, with the affiliates, with the market, getting further investment and everything. I wish you best of luck with your continuing journey with Recast and thank you very much for joining me at Recommerce Intelligence.

Ignacio Vial (17:31.097)

Thank you, Emma.

Pieter (17:31.35)

Thank you for your time.