About the Founder

Passion

  1. Intense driving or overmastering feeling or conviction
  2. A strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object or concept
  3. An object of desire or deep interest

Imagine.  Standing on the bow of a skiff as you are guided across a shallow grass flat on a sunny, breeze-less day, you spot the back of a 30 inch redfish gliding through the water.  Your heart suddenly begins to pound with anticipation.  You take a deep breath, make one false cast, and then launch your favorite fly toward its target.  After a short strip of the line, the redfish engulfs what is at the end of it.  You set the hook.  Line peels off your reel. Your rod is bent with tension.  And finally this fish swings to the side of the skiff.  It's yours. The moment is timeless.  Passion and opportunity have collided together.

This is passion. This is my lifestyle.  

man with fish

I began fishing with my father and grandfather, “Big Daddy” as we affectionately called him, when I was a little boy. My first fishing experiences began when I was five, bass fishing on a lake in East Texas.   At eight, I had graduated from sitting in a john boat with a Zebco 202 reel to wading the shorelines of the bays around Port O'Connor, TX with “Big Daddy.”  Speckled trout and redfish were our quarry.  In 1983, my family bought a house in Montana on the banks of the Yellowstone River.  I was 13 years old.  That’s when I had my first experience with a fly rod.   Those were great memories and a taste of something I would continue to crave as I grew older.  From my first fishing experiences up until now, I've been fortunate to cover a lot of water over the years – our Texas lakes, the Gulf Coast, rivers across the United States and onto Mongolia, Mexico, Belize, the Bahamas, Caribbean, Canada, South America, Central America, and Scotland.   From baby brook trout to 800 pound marlin - anything that I can find that might bite my line.  Just put me on the water with a fish to pursue and I am content.

I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin and later got an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Although my day job keeps me in an office most of the time, I spend a lot of my free time on the water when I am able to leave work and family obligations behind.  Adding up my time on the water, I have now spent several years of my life with some type of fishing pole in my hand.  Out of the all the fishing I have done, I have spent the most amount of time chasing redfish with a fly rod on the Texas coast...and that's where the inspiration for Dagon's logo came from – a redfish crawling thru the shallows.

Starting Dagon Apparel Co has been a dream that I've had for several years.  The dream of creating my own fishing apparel line that would offer shirts that had both high functionality and style was finally too hard to resist its call. I have worn the usual suspect brands of fishing shirts over the years but have never settled on any one brand I particularly liked.  It either didn’t have the right pockets, the right style, or the right fit for me.  In particular, I wanted certain types of pockets where I could stuff exactly what I wanted to fish within them so I didn’t need a bunch of other gear hanging on me, getting in the way, or slowing me down trying to get to it when there were fish ready to be caught.  I wanted to bring more functionality to rolling up sleeves so line won’t tangle in them or they don’t flap loosely during a cast.  And of course I wanted some style when I donned on a shirt.  I just didn’t want to look like the twin of “that guy” in the other boat that had ran out to the closest sporting goods store to buy his first fishing shirt.  Dagon was founded to design stylish, highly functional fishing shirts that fishermen would get real excited about to wear.  Shirts that would match the passion we share for fishing.  I thought, “if we can build somebody's favorite shirt to wear fishing, then we might be able to build a business around that.”  If we cannot, then we have failed in our mission. We hope that you, our customers, will help us achieve our mission – that some of our shirts will become your favorites to wear.   As we create other products outside of shirts, such as pants, shorts, shoes, hats, or whatever we make, we hope that those products too will become somebody's favorite item to wear when they fish. If we can achieve our vision of building the favorite fishing apparel for our customers, the dream of building up a successful fishing apparel brand will take care of itself.

Why Dagon?

One can choose from thousands of names that connote fishing or fish when choosing a name for a fishing apparel business.  What I wanted to find was a unique name that symbolizes what our brand is about.  As we looked through different ideas for names, we came across Dagon.  Dagon is the name of the ancient Babylonian fish god. Our name had the elements that I was looking for – a two syllable word, an ancient history, a name that might invoke passion – i.e. a name that people had worshiped at one time, and a name that was about fishing or a fish.  So, we chose this name – Dagon - to build a brand around.  Dagon, the ancient half man and half fish god.   Rise up.