“Cha-ching.”
Danny Arballo heard that repeatedly last week after an endorsement on Bassmaster LIVE created buzz for his buzzbait.
Arballo, the owner of Brazalo Custom Lures in Sherwood, Ark., is alerted with the cash-register sound for each sale on Shopify. On Championship Sunday of the MAXAM Tire Bassmaster Elite at Sabine River, Arballo’s phone “blew up” after eventual winner Pat Schlapper told viewers he was throwing his Brazalo Bushwhacker Buzzbait.
“Cha-ching, cha-ching,” Arballo said. “From 7:30 a.m., when it was mentioned on TV, to 9:30, my phone couldn’t even keep up. It was just going crazy. It went nuts all day. It was pretty surreal. And chaos ensued.”
Arriving at his shop early Monday, Arballo printed out a two-inch stack of orders, putting him and lure builders Tim Posvar and Landon Moore into overdrive. They had to call in reserves and even paused production when they ran out of special thick-gauge wire.
“Crazy is about the best way I can explain,” he said. “Typically, it’s three guys building baits. One time last week, we had seven people in here. We worked 92 hours, straight through Memorial Day, and we’re still rolling. We moved a lot of product.”
In one week, the company sent out as many lures — more than 5,000 — as it had in the past 12 months.
And Arballo expects a sustained windfall. He’s in discussions with Schlapper and several national retailers. That has him looking into adding more machinery, workers and moving to a larger workshop.
Brazalo was already well-known in the business, shipping its handful of bait styles to select retailers across the country. Arballo attends trade shows and maintains a social media presence, anything and everything to grow his company.
An angler promoting and winning with your product is any lure-maker’s dream scenario.
Creating some buzz
Baits exposed on tournament circuits have long seen booms, some selling out before the winner was determined. Brazalo received a boost in 2021 when Evan Barnes of Dardanelle, Ark., posted a tournament top 10 with the Bushwhacker. That’s when Schlapper first saw it and liked how it sounded.
“It’s hard for me to find a quality buzzbait that ran right, was built correctly, just had good components,” Schlapper said. “Basically, I bought a whole bunch of different buzzbaits, and that was the best one. Since I found that bait, it’s the only buzzbait I’ve thrown.”
The buzzbait was a big part of Schlapper’s plan at the Sabine. During practice, he was catching quality bass every morning at most every stop on the Bushwhacker, but finding a fish near pipelines in the final afternoon altered his attack.
Using a jig he hand-poured, Schlapper took the Day 1 lead with 12 pounds, 2 ounces. After 8-7 on Day 2, Schlapper caught one fish with the buzzbait on Semifinal Saturday. Conditions on Championship Sunday sent him on the winning flurry along northern shores of oxbows.
“There was more of a breeze in the correct direction, and it was cloudy, which extended that bite long enough where I could capitalize on it,” said Schlapper, who caught four quality bass on the Bushwhacker. “It was all about knowing when to do it and where to do it. I had that dialed in better than most of the other guys.”
With 38-12, Schlapper won his first blue trophy, and in the process, created quite the hubbub for a 750-square-foot shop north of Little Rock.
Arballo got a hint something was up around 6:30 a.m. Sunday. Moore, his 17-year-old worker who fishes high school bass, texted him a photo from Bassmaster.com’s Day 3 gallery. Schlapper was casting the Bushwhacker.
“I started looking though the photos,” Arballo said. “‘Wait a minute, these are all Elites!’ I saw Pat’s last name. ‘Wait, this guy’s winning the tournament!’”
It wasn’t long before friends began sending Arballo the footage of Schlapper talking on LIVE about the buzzbait, even though it wasn’t among his sponsors.
‘Let’s do something’
“I’m a genuine person and when they put me on the spot, I’m not going to lie about it,” said Schlapper, who paired the buzzbait with sponsor Big Bite Baits Black Tour Toad.
After explaining aspects of why he likes the lure on LIVE, Schlapper seemed to address Arballo directly, saying “Let’s do something.”
“They contacted me right away,” Schlapper said. “It’s a good bait. They’re killing it. They’re making more money than they ever have, and they gave me the credit for it, but it’s not as easy as just signing a contract.
“I haven’t hammered anything out in writing because there’s some other moving parts. I have to make sure I don’t do anything dumb.”
Three years ago, Schlapper bought about $150 of Bushwhackers. He fell for the consistent tick sound the clacker made when hitting the free-sliding brass bead, but he came to understand other features that make it the best buzzbait he’s encountered.
“There was just a lot of detail to it you don’t get in a mass-produced baits,” he said. “There are so many little things they did to that bait.
“They wrap braid around the eyelet where you tie it on, which I didn’t understand until I watched a video they made. It helped the rigidity, made it stiffer and stay together better. You got better hookups. They angled the wire so the toad was running further under the water, so they ate it better.”
Arballo said it was mind-blowing for his team to have an Elite winner use their bait. And well-remembered will be Schlapper’s line.
“’Let’s do something.’ That’s going to be our new T-shirt tagline,” Arballo said.
Trucking out of Texas
Growing up fishing east Texas, Arballo started competing in tournaments in his 20s, but the lure of a steady income kept him off bigger bass trails. Out of need, Arballo started pouring baits in a little shed behind his house. He couldn’t find any more of the jigs he liked. Friends would ask to borrow baits, and he was soon selling them from his truck.
The Bushwhacker was introduced in 2019. Two years later, after 25 years of working logistics for trucking companies, he decided to build baits full-time.
“I told my wife, if I don’t do it now, I never will,” he said. “It started with the idea of selling enough to pay for my fishing tournaments. Then it actually turned into making money. I started tinkering, making molds. The Bushwhacker was the first.”
The Bushwhacker has remained a cherished staple in Brazalo’s lineup. With a spin-casting machine, furnace to melt lead and paint and baking stations, Brazalo also makes a smaller Wee-Whacker buzzbait, spinnerbaits, bladed jigs, wacky rigs, swim jigs and an underbelly spin.
After the Sabine, Arballo found Schlapper’s original order, and among the walls of baits and equipment, dug out the mold that had been shelved since he modified the lure.
“It was a great bait, but there were things on it I didn’t like,” he said. “We went in and redesigned, changed the head style on it. Everything on that bait has purpose, why it is the way it is.”
That’s what sold Schlapper, who in his breakthrough victory introduced it to so many others. Arballo said it should give hope to anyone who works hard and believes their big break is just around the corner.
“I feel this is a huge deal in the industry,” Arballo said. “On the scale of small businesses, we’re probably on the larger side, and other small companies look up to us.
“This has shown there’s light at the end at the tunnel for a lot of small bait makers, that there’s a possibility it can happen to them.”
