Mario Friendy keeps a bluebill decoy with fifteen holes in it. He put them there himself.

Twenty yards, direct hits, on purpose. He wanted to know what a Final Approach diver would take before it quit, and the only honest way to find out was to put a gun on it.

“It was blown to shit,” he said. “It still had its shape. The plastic was off, the foam was still there.”

The decoy still floats. He still hunts it. “It’s huntable.”

That’s more or less Final Approach’s entire argument, and Friendy has been making it since 2018 on behalf of a company with a better claim to American field hunting than any other name in the business.

The InventionThe company that changed field hunting

Before Final Approach, hiding in a picked field meant burlap and sheets of plastic and cornstalks dragged over your chest. That is exactly how Friendy learned to hunt as a kid in Pennsylvania. “People probably think I’m a caveman,” he said. Then Ron Latschaw built something a man could lie down inside, put stubble straps on it before anybody had heard of stubble straps, and the sport never went back.

“There would be no other layout blinds if it wasn’t for that,” Friendy said. “It wouldn’t even be an idea. I’m sure somebody at some point would have come up with it. But Ron did everything.”

The company pulled people in the way the product did. Final Approach in that era ran damn near everybody who’d go on to matter in waterfowl through its orbit. Fred Zink, Foiles, Bill Saunders, Sean Mann. Callers and salesmen and pro staffers, guys who would leave and start their own companies and turn into the competition.

“I don’t try to push on anybody that Final Approach is the linchpin,” Friendy said. “But it’s pretty close, if it isn’t it.”

He came up in it himself, on the pro staff, back when the title meant work. You stood in a booth in January answering questions from strangers. You sold. “You were considered a decent hunter in your area that knew what you were doing,” he said. “You were a good guy, got along with everybody, and honestly, you were a killer. And you didn’t walk around like you were somebody.”

And you picked a side, because there were sides. When Fred Zink left for Avery, the two companies went after the same hunters at every trade show and store event in the country.

“It was war,” Friendy said. “Like the old time in the NBA, or older NFL. If you were on another team, you were not friends or even friendly with each other. It’s not like now, where everybody gets paid and everybody’s all happy and shaking hands.”

He hasn’t entirely let it go, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise. “I’m not saying publicly that I don’t like anybody at any other company that makes stuff that we make,” he said. “But I really don’t.” He isn’t apologetic about it. “That’s just how I was brought up, and that’s just me. So I got to keep that edge.” He is also not looking for a reconciliation. “I don’t want to go to dinner with anybody like that.”

The DriftLosing the shine

Then the brand got sold, and sold again. Every new owner brought new people, new factories, new ideas about what Final Approach was supposed to be, and somewhere in the churn the quality control went soft and the new product stopped coming. Nothing collapsed. That was almost the worst of it. Hunters didn’t turn on Final Approach so much as quit thinking about it.

“It never got totally destroyed,” Friendy said. “But it did lose its shine. It was there, but nobody really thought much of it. It was like, we don’t really hate it, but we don’t really like it.”

He knows exactly how far it went, because it reached him. After years of standing in those booths telling hunters Final Approach was the one to buy, there came a day when he went out and bought a blind from somebody else, because the ones he owned were breaking.

“I was really upset that I had to do that,” he said. There was no way around it. “I couldn’t trust it at the time. Man, that hurt.”

He went and worked elsewhere for a while. Some time with Buck Gardner, then with Fred Zink, a few other stops, while Final Approach kept drifting through owners without him.

In 2018 his parent company bought it. He met with them the day the deal was announced.

“I just said, I’m the guy. I’m built for this. This is the job that, when everybody goes, what job should you be doing. This was it. There’s no doubt.”

“It never got totally destroyed. But it did lose its shine.”

The RebuildTwo years to get one year ahead

He got the job, and then he got a look at what he’d asked for.

There was a warehouse of old inventory to move and a stack of cost sheets that came apart the moment anybody read them closely. Before anyone could design anything new, somebody had to go find the factories, visit them, and decide whether those were the factories Final Approach ought to be in at all. “You’re going through and you’re like, man, that shouldn’t cost that much,” he said. “A lot of stuff, the pricing was off. The quality wasn’t matching the pricing.”

Meanwhile the seasons kept arriving. They’d taken over already a year behind, because nobody had put anything in the pipeline for the following fall, so every month spent cleaning up the past was a month not spent building anything. “So it took two years to just get ahead a year,” he said. “The first year or two, we’re just shoveling uphill. It was awful.”

None of which makes for good content. Nobody films a mold cost negotiation. You can’t put sourcing audit on a hat. But it’s why the company now works two and three years out on product instead of scrambling to get something on a shelf by September.

The name is what bought them the time. “The good thing was the name was never totally trashed,” Friendy said. “Final Approach has always been a cool name. It’s wide open for anything.”

The other thing that survived was four words somebody wrote before he ever worked there. Tough conditions, tougher gear. “That was something that they used early on, and we still use that, because that’s really what it’s about.” Stuff that isn’t going to break. Stuff that gets you through a season, and then through countless seasons after it.

The BlindThe blind he’d bet the brand on

Ask which product he’d stake the whole company on and he doesn’t wait for you to finish. “It’s the knockout blind, for sure.”

It had to be a blind. The blind built Final Approach, and the blind was the first thing they went after.

“You got one shot to own it. And if you don’t own it, somebody’s going to make your thing better.”

Every guide running layouts in those years gave the same speech before shooting light, and Friendy gave it more times than he can remember. Don’t stand up and put your hands on the blind. Push down on a side rail to lever yourself upright and the bar would bend, and once it bent it telescoped, and then you were lying in a field inside something that folded like a cheap lawn chair.

He still owns his original Eliminator, so he didn’t have to guess at what needed fixing. The first change they made, before anything else, was support bars along the sides. No more bent rails, no more speech at shooting light. “You could stand on it,” he said. Then they took the full frame off the foot bag so the thing folds down smaller, which matters when they’re going in a trailer or getting packed in on foot. Then came the mesh hood over the back, because a blind can be brushed perfectly and still leave a black hole where a man’s head is, and that hole is exactly what a circling bird finds.

“There’s been countless times I’ve been in a field calling and I’m totally turned around looking through the mesh, and I’m not getting busted.”

Every one of those fixes came out of hunting rather than out of a meeting. Friendy spends 110-plus days a year in the field on waterfowl alone, which is his answer when somebody points out that every company in America claims its gear is built by hunters. “If I can’t break it, I’m not saying you can’t break it. But it’ll be tough to do it.”

It’s also why nothing leaves the building if it’s going to need a version two. He’s watched enough products come out half-finished and get quietly corrected a year later to know how that story ends. “You got one shot to own it. And if you don’t own it, somebody’s going to make your thing better.”

Things go wrong anyway. The handles on their snow socks were tearing loose when guys really yanked them out of the ground, so they redesigned them, and when the first redesign wasn’t enough they did it again. Everybody got replacements or their money back. Friendy reads the customer service inbox himself every morning, and has since the day they bought the company, because he wants the pulse of it, and if something’s going wrong he wants to know quick enough to change it. These days the inbox mostly wants stakes and replacement heads.

He also reads it closely enough to tell a defect from a user. An outfitter came in with six blinds, every one torn in the same back corner. Friendy replaced all six, and then said the part most companies swallow. “I’m gonna tell you this one time, because we’re not replacing them again. Your guides are putting their foot on the fabric and not the bar, and they’re ripping the fabric.”

Ask how he balances the old guard against the young crowd and he won’t take it, because he doesn’t think the gear splits that way. You’re in a boat with a big blind bag or you’re walking in with a pack, and they build for both. What splits by age is money and hats. “It’s the flat bill versus the trucker hat. My hat is here, the flat trucker hats are here, and we gotta have both.”

The BirdsAttitude

Somewhere in all this Friendy says something you don’t often hear from a man whose job is selling decoys, which is that the category is close to finished innovating. “I don’t want to say we’re at the end of the rope, but we’re close. It’s really tough right now.” A piece of plastic can only be made to look so much like a duck, and after this many years of everybody chasing the same thing, most of the easy ground is taken.

What’s left is the hard ground, and the word he keeps coming back to is attitude.

A wigeon doesn’t sit on the water like a mallard. A pintail doesn’t hold its head like a gadwall. They’re different birds and they ought to read as different birds from far enough out that nobody can see a feather. The industry’s usual answer is one upright, one feeder and one low head, repeated across every species with the paint changed. Final Approach went the other way and hired four world champion carvers, then handed each of them the birds he sees best.

Wayne Simkin, up in Canada, a two-time world champion, took most of the goose floaters, the teal, some of the divers. Jamie Welch out of South Carolina has the full-body snows, the specks and lessers, and the spoonbill, which Friendy calls a crowd favorite. Tom Christie, six-time champion, out of Nebraska, got the pintails, the wigeon and the gadwall, and the turkeys besides, partly because he is somehow both one of the most talented carvers Friendy has worked with and the quickest. “Tom is a freak show.” The combination isn’t supposed to exist. “You can’t tell me you’re the best mechanic and then you’re also the fastest mechanic.” Pat Godin, also in Canada and a seventeen-time champion, does the mallards and the wood ducks, all the full bodies and all the poses, and holds, Friendy swears, an actual university degree in mallard studies. By Friendy’s own count the world championships between the four of them add up to almost thirty.

“When we got to the wigeon, Tom knows exactly what that attitude should be,” he said. “Like a high-head whistler.”

Getting a dozen mallards and a dozen wigeon and a dozen teal to look like three different species took more staring at birds than he’ll fully own up to. “We really went kind of psychotic overboard on it.”

Then the carving has to survive the factory, and Friendy has watched plenty that didn’t. A carver hands over something alive, the paint comes back flat, and what shows up in the box is a shape you have to talk yourself into. “You go, yeah, I guess it’s kind of a wigeon.” So the argument moves to the production floor, where samples go back and forth until the man who carved the original will put his name on the mass-produced version. “I’m not saying it’s going to win a contest. But a world champion is telling me a mass-produced decoy is up to speed. There’s nobody beating us on that.”

It’s the same thinking that gets their honkers and lessers different paint schemes, when the industry painted them identically for years, and that puts a curve in the motion cone under the full bodies so a decoy bobs and rocks like a bird that’s feeding instead of spinning like a bird on a stick. It’s also why every diver they make is foam filled, which is the whole reason that shot-up bluebill is still floating.

The top of the line gets proven where the hunting is worst. His hardest days are pressured public river, miles of open water with the boat hidden as well as he can manage, and out there he’ll put out fewer than a dozen decoys and every one of them is fully flocked, because there’s no margin for anything else. “It is as serious as possible.” Flocking is its own problem. Paint sits differently on it, the whites move, the light colors go wrong, and plenty of companies never get it right. He’ll stack their birds against anybody’s, and he’s got the mileage to say so, having run other companies’ decoys for years as research on what he was up against. Fully flocked honkers are coming this season, and he’ll put those against anything on the market. “I’m not afraid of those guys.”

The compliments he trusts most come from crane hunters in Texas and Oklahoma and Canada, who keep calling him about the fully flocked ones. “You’re talking about the best eyes in waterfowl and probably the smartest bird. When I get those compliments, I go, yeah, we’re dialed in.”

Price runs underneath all of it, because Friendy knows what a blind bag costs to build and what a backpack costs to build, and there’s no unknowing it. “I see somebody, it’s a 200 backpack or a 300 backpack, and I go, are we doing right?” The same arithmetic governs a dozen decoys. “I can’t sleep at night selling some guy 500 decoys when they should be sold for 300, and we’re making money, and then we’re getting greedy.” What he wants instead is simpler. “I just want guys to be stoked that they get stuff from us at a decent price. And it kicks ass.”

What’s NextThe whole trailer

The thing he’s most worked up about is a full-body wigeon, built for the way the West hunts them, sheet water and shallow ground where floaters don’t quite close the deal. It’s finished and about a month out. He already knows how it lands, because he took early versions on a hunt last season with men he’s known forever and didn’t tell them what was in the bag. “I pulled them out and they were like kids at Christmas.”

A hooded merganser is coming too, which makes no sense on a spreadsheet, and he knows it, which is why he went through harvest reports state by state before he’d commit to the carving. The math is that nobody’s buying a dozen hoodies. A guy on a river wants two or three in the spread, and there are enough of those guys. The turkey line is in its third year. There are other categories he wouldn’t name. Rogers Sporting Goods handles everything in the U.S., distributors cover Canada and New Zealand and most of Europe, and there’s essentially no ad budget behind any of it.

“I really just want to put a post out that says, listen, we just make really good stuff for guys who hunt hard. I don’t know how else to tell you.” There’s no budget for the alternative and no appetite for it either. “I’m not like a snake oil salesman.”

Ask about legacy and he reaches back for a tagline that was running before he ever worked there, the waterfowler’s company. What he means by it is harder than it sounds.

“Guys will just cherry-pick. I use these mallards, but then I buy these pintails. I buy this blind bag, but I run this blind.” That isn’t how it used to be. “I remember back in the day, you ran everything because everything was good.” Getting back there is the whole project. “Naming a company where you use everything from that company, that’s tough.”

Not one good blind. Not one good dozen. The whole trailer.

“I’m not afraid of those guys.”

Which is a tall order, and Friendy knows it better than anybody, having once been the guy who went looking somewhere else. His bet is that if the gear stays honest, nobody has to make that trip again.

We’ll be hunting Final Approach gear this season. By the end of it we should know whether he’s right.

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