Summer 2025
W
e all have seen many of the big bass
(largemouth and striped bass) catches that the
G-Ratt lineup is responsible for; but we don’t all know how G-Ratt came to be. Here’s how it all went down.
Microsoft-style G-Ratt began in a garage, but before even that it began as a lure company that Garrett Dixon acquired from Jason Kincannon about 13 years ago. The first baits coming out of the garage were the Sneaky Pete, Magic Mouse, and Swimming Rat.
Fast-forward a couple of years and G-Ratt’s ownership expanded, and they decided it was time to go big. They manufactured 1,500 baits, went to the ISE Show, and sold out within 48 hours. While it blew the G-Ratt’s minds, a cold fact set in – there was no more inventory and so became the beginning of the journey to mass production of the G-Ratt arsenal. Dixon jumped on board with WesternBass for some Q and A on the rest of the story.
WB: How did you move through the process of securing manufacturing?
Dixon: I landed on a source in China and then went through the whole excruciating process of molds and after four or five months, I had a prototype of the Sneaky Pete.
That was the bait we decided to launch G-Ratt with at ICAST.
WB: What was the ICAST launch like?
Dixon: That year we went with eight skews in eight colors on one product and we went all the way across the country to Florida to figure out how to put this in front of the eyes of the biggest fishermen in the world and the biggest companies in the world and see where it takes us. If we didn’t get any bites, if nobody wanted ‘em or wanted to be customers then we were ready to hang it up andw go back to our regular jobs. After the second night, we hand landed several customers, and people were excited and enthused about the product and putting it on their shelves to get it moving. It was a happy moment. Within weeks of getting home, we got our first distribution order out and the Sneaky Pete was on the market.
WB: What was G-Ratt’s next step?
Dixon: We wanted to expand with more than eight colors of one bait, so we decided we wanted to build different sizes of a glide bait. The next size we came out with was the downsized version – the Pistol Pete. We launched that the next year at ICAST. It took a year, because
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