About ColdTuna

In The Beginning

ColdTuna was founded by Richard Lindenmeyer in 1997. At the time, Richard was a business student enrolled in the Entrepreneur Program at the University of Southern California (Fight On Trojans). Sometimes it's tough to determine what you want to do with your life while still in college, but he was forced into making a decision, because he had a business plan due at the end of the semester. Being an avid fisherman since before he can remember...something his dad and him enjoy to this day, Richard decided it would be pretty cool to have a fishing business. Richard and his dad had in excess of 40 rods and reels, both freshwater and saltwater rods and those rods were stored in some crude, but effective fishing rod racks the old man made out of wood and hung overhead in the garage. With the thought of his rod racks in mind, Richard set out to design a fishing rod storage rack that could be hung overhead, accomoidate both freshwater and saltwater rods, and one where you could keep the reels on your rods, since that's what he normally did. You can't imagine the number of prototypes Richard went through. The prototype fishing rod racks presented at USC are not even in production today, but they were good enough for him to ace that class.

Finding a Manufacturer

Richard finally came up with the patented design of the Ultimate Rod Sitter around 2000. Back in those days, each rack was made by hand...a very expensive and time consuming effort to say the least. Cutting sheets of plastic was not his speciality and he probably jacked up half the racks I made. Richard was selling so many rod rack on ColdTuna.com, he had to automate the process, so the design was shopped around to a bunch of machine shops. We were turned down by so many shops....it's just find it hard to believe that they would turn away business. Guess they though Richard didn't have money or something.

How We Got Our Name

When searching for a company name, Richard wanted something that was catchy....something people would remember. As he was searching domain names, and it seemed all the top choices were already taken. HeI typed in "HotTuna"....and that was taken. Then he typed in "ColdTuna", and that name was available. There you have it.....the orgin of our company name....it was about the only .com website name Richard could find at the time.

Quality Products

Richard was so tired of seeing all the cheap fishing rod racks on the market, he was determined to make the highest quality rack on the market, and we believe we've done that. Our racks are injection molded, 1/4" thick ABS. They are super strong, look great, and will last longer than you or I. They are versatile too. You can hang our racks anywhere, at any angle, and your rods won't fall out. We've sold over 10,000 racks since our humble beginnings in 1997.