Orvis' Return to Roots, with Simon Perkins
The Orvis Fly-Fishing Podcast
James Hathaway
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest this week is Simon Perkins [1:11], president of The Orvis Company and a third-generation family member to run the company. You may have heard about some major changes in Orvis' business over the past couple years, and Simon relates both his emotional struggle with restructuring the company and also his optimism about a laser focus on Orvis' core values: Fly fishing, upland hunting, and protection of our natural resources. Why there will be a greater emphasis on independent fly shops. And also the greatly streamlined Orvis apparel offering and how that affected which Orvis retail stores remained open.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, and welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing Podcast. |
| 0:16.7 | This is your host, Tom Rosenbauer. |
| 0:18.4 | And my guest this week is Simon Per perkins president of the orvis company |
| 0:23.2 | simon is the third generation of perkins family who has uh run the orvis company since |
| 0:32.1 | 1965 it is still a family owned company and uh you have probably or you you may have heard that there have been some changes in Orvis recently. |
| 0:44.0 | And I know that a lot of you are loyal Arvis customers, and you're concerned that there's some changes at Orvis, and you're not quite sure where Orvis is going. |
| 0:55.0 | So I thought no better person to tell you about this than Simon Perkins. So without further ado, |
| 1:03.3 | let's go talk to Simon about Orvis's return to its roots. |
| 1:10.8 | Well, my guest today is Simon Perkins. |
| 1:14.6 | Simon is president of the Orvis Company. |
| 1:18.8 | Simon is the third generation of the Perkins family who has owned Orvis since |
| 1:26.5 | 1965. |
| 1:27.4 | And it's amazing that Orvis since 1965. |
| 1:37.7 | And it's amazing that Orvis in its history since 1856 has only had three owners, three families that have owned the company. |
| 1:39.4 | So, Simon, welcome to the podcast. |
| 1:40.4 | You've been on before. |
| 1:50.7 | We talked about, I don't know, I think fishing from a drift boat one time. Yeah, that was, yeah, been on a couple times, but it's good, it's good to be back. It's, it's, it's nice being in your studio. Yeah. It's a good set of. It's a great setup. We've got a lot of stuff. We've got a lot of stuff here in the background. But Orvis is, Orvis has, uh, undergone some, some big changes. |
| 2:03.2 | You know, I've been with the company for, it'll be 50 years in June. |
| 2:07.3 | And these are the biggest changes I have seen in my entire time there. |
| 2:11.3 | And I know that, I know that people have probably, um, heard about changes happening at orvis stores closing and so on. So I wanted to get on, |
| 2:21.5 | get you on the podcast to talk about these changes and why. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned it. |
| 2:31.5 | You know, we're, we're part of a company that's been around for 170 years and the same ownership for 60 years, which is, which is really unique in our industry in the, in the world of fly fishing and wind shooting. |
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