Meet Darrell Kenny | Owner/ lure maker

We had the good fortune of connecting with Darrell Kenny and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Darrell, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I have a wife and two kids and being close to them as much as possible has always been the most important thing to me. We got into bait making because we wanted to be able to make whatever baits we wanted and whatever color we wanted. So like a lot of people with their Hobbies I was documenting it on my social media accounts. After a few months I started getting asked if people could buy stuff for me. That’s when I started looking into what it takes to make a business. Something to know about Ohio is if your hobby makes money you have to pay taxes on those profits but you can’t have any deductions unless you make it a business. So we told people no until we can incorporate it as an LLC and do everything by the book. My wife and I worked for the same small company. After more than eight years he decided to sell it and we found ourselves needing to find a new job. My wife found a great job working from home and I decided to go full blast on Stillwater and make it my full-time job. So the thought process was really kind of sporadic we started out buying things we wanted and not things you would buy if you were trying to build it into a business so in a sense we had to play a little bit of catch up and figure out what exactly we needed to get to be where we would have been if we would have had that mindset from the beginning.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Where to start. My name is Darrell, and I own and operate Stillwater Bait Co. While I am the owner/operator I feelit important to say that this would never be what it is without the help and support of my family and friends, both inside and outside of the bait making community. I also have relied heavily on friends I’ve made in the community and the community itself for its input and criticism. That being said the way that we came about is we are an outdoor and angling family. We thought it would be fun too be able to make our own crappy bait in any color we wanted whenever we needed so long story short we spend a few years watching and learning everything we could about soft plastic bait making and then bought some molds and some plastisol. As fate would have it an awesome couple that I had been following on social media for a few years (Jason and Amanda Kobishop @epicbaitmolds) decided to go into business making CNC machined molds for soft plastic bait making. We were excited to work with some of the molds they were putting out as they were outside of the box and very high quality. As with any hobby we were documenting it on social media, and after a few weeks I had people asking if they could buy dates from us. I told people no for months as I did not feel like I was good enough at the craft to be selling anything yet and I also wanted to make sure I was doing everything legally as far as a business goes. We’re a lot of lessons I’ve learned come into play. Because this kind of grew from a hobby we didn’t purchase molds with production in mind. Which left us at a slight disadvantage when we started to get bigger orders. We also did not take any kind of loans or help we bought everything out of pocket paycheck by paycheck. We continue to do that as well as put 90% of the profits back into the company to help it grow and expand. Another lesson we learned quickly was that there is a lot more to a small business than just the product or service that you offer. There’s advertising their social media which is 1 million percent Paramount to any small business in my opinion. If you have a small business you should constantly be posting. To multiple platforms to get your product or service in front of as many eyes as possible every single day. We also had to get an accountant because once we tried to do the taxes we realize there was so many things that we did not know about. Overcoming challenges has been very educational if you can look at them the right way everything is a lesson so there have been a lot of late nights a lot of redoing orders for every reason from me messing up to shipping losing them to them being stolen out of our car. You just learned to roll with the punches and adapt and overcome do whatever you can within reason to make sure that the customer still gets taken care of. One of the things that I’m most proud of or excited about as far as bait making goes is that I feel like I’ve found my style and my flow to really stand out and be recognized for the look of the lures I put out. Outside of the business I am most excited about being able to do something that I truly love and stay around my family to do it.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We live on a few acres in the woods so we like to just stay there to relax. I said most of our friends are into being outdoors so honestly given our area we play go fishing spend some time out in the woods adventuring maybe hit up a car show one of the church parking lots on the weekend I have a couple of bonfires dinner cooked over at Oak and fire a couple of drinks. Good food good friends good conversation.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
The great thing about the bait making Community is there a lot of people who are more than willing to help you out as much as they can. It’s almost a list that I would feel bad not to include certain people on so I will list a few. Arthur Slater @fishdaddy401 another person who is a huge inspiration and help in my learning and journey is Brad Hardy @oracle_lures

Website: stillwaterbaitco.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/stillwaterbaitco?igshid=NzZlODBkYWE4Ng==

Twitter: https://x.com/Stillwaterbaits?t=jJb6MlJYwQepUCMnYsXh0g&s=09

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@stillwaterbaitco9008?si=VwSDWKIFXvxwu4wq

Image Credits
All photos taken by myself or my wife Lisa