![]() ![]() His marketing strategy has been to post YouTube videos online to demonstrate the JawJacker. The jigs are made for him by a man in Minnesota, and the graphite rods are made for him in China. He also sells a selection of jigs and ice-fishing rods on his website. The JawJacker attaches to a motorized base that raises and lowers the rod, line and jig automatically to attract fish. When you’re in the tent you hear the JawJacker go, ‘Bing,’ and you’re good,” Dougan said.ĭungan’s latest product hitting the market this past ice-fishing season is called the Jigging JawJacker. “ If you have four or five poles out, and you’re watching the one that you’re jigging, the JawJacker comes in super handy. Ice fisherman Chris Dougan of Idaho Falls, who admits to having thousands of dollars worth of gear, said he uses the JawJacker. Each year afterward his business grew with new connections with Bass Pro Shops and other outdoors stores and word of mouth. The first year he made 1,000 JawJackers and sold about half online and the rest at Sportsman’s Warehouse. It was enough money to buy the injection molds that I needed,” he said. I basically took a second mortgage out on my house. Then he found a manufacturer in Texas who could create plastic injection molds and build and box the final product in his China plant.īut before the JawJacker could become reality, Dungan needed money. He obtained a patent on his trigger mechanism in 2007. You don’t want something big and cumbersome.”Īfter coming up with his design, an engineer neighbor who had CAD software helped him draw up designs. “When you go ice fishing there is a lot of stuff you have to take on the ice. “I wanted to make this thing light and compact,” he said. Hook-setting devices have been around since the 1800s, but they were often huge and cumbersome, ill-suited for ice fishing. ![]() I had a drill press and table saw, and I made some prototypes.” The device would go on to sell thousands each year and eventually make more money than his nursing profession. It sets the hook in their mouth and kind of jacks their jaw.” “I thought it was kind of a catchy name,” he said. No longer a poor college student, he entertained ideas of making and selling a device that would give ice fishers the ability to set hooks without hovering over their holes. He went ice fishing again with a friend, this time to Strawberry Reservoir in Utah. After a few years, he was living in Rigby and working as a nurse in Idaho Falls. The idea was put on a shelf while he studied nursing, got married, bought a house and began working. “I caught three or four fish with them,” he said about that outing. He made up devices that used the bent rod as a spring with a trigger mechanism to hook a fish when it nibbled on the bait. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ ” “They were just looking at their rod tip and waiting for them to bounce when the fish bit,” he said. Then as a student at Ricks College, Dave and Gerald Oldham took him ice fishing for the first time at Island Park Reservoir. “I was always figuring out trigger mechanisms,” Dungan said. IDAHO FALLS – Matt Dungan’s highly successful ice-fishing gear business started when he was a boy trapping possums in the woods of Tennessee. ![]()
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