5 questions with Maurice Flanx
We met up with Maurice from the German brand Flanx recently, a proper old school German angler running his own brand for a couple of years now. Mostly in Germany and Austria for now, but he’s coming to Belgium/Benelux now too! We posed him 5 questions & we have a mega giveaway for our customers!
Hi Maurice, can you introduce the Flanx brand to the Benelux please? You’re from Germany yourself, and we’re pretty sure a lot of people have heard about Flank on social media, or seen you at Zwolle or even at the Belgian show Carp Bredene.
“Hi Gio.. Yes, a few Dutch & Belgium anglers might have seen me on the Carp Bredene show, in the very early stages of Flanx, where I had the chance to show a bit of the then coming products (I couldn’t sell anything as these were samples still…) A wider audience saw me on the last two Zwolle Shows, and especially on the last one we did extremely well. Shame there isn’t one this year due to Covid…”
“Where should I start… Being from Cologne I started to fish Dutch and Belgium waters at the age of 18 and so I got influences from England, Belgium, Holland and Germany. This can still be found in my tackle today! In the past I worked for Korda, ACE, Taska, Ultimate and DAM, and all of this culminated in Flanx! Flanx is the first time where I can decide totally on my own! Fruits of this are my Carp1 and Inceptor rods, the nowadays nearly famous and protected CarpSub Retainer, tents, nets or some specimen gear like the Barbel Retainer or the Specimen Mat! Everything is really my brainchild and not just some random labelled Chinese stuff!”
“You? No! 😂 No, you had your significant influence in the form of the logo… You (or better your lovely girlfriend) made it! It is everything I wanted… Simple but somehow clever and memorable! I loved it from the first moment, made a little twist et voilà!“
“As I said, from 18 till my mid twenties I fished mainly in Dutch and Belgium waters due to their vicinity from where I live.. Some friendships are till today valid, like Mario Gijbels, Rudi DeZutter, Leon Sturme, Herman Koene… Later I started to fish some French & Hungarian venues. I am a kind of modern cold school angler! My whole life I fished a minimum of 2 nights a week, most times even 3 or 4 nights. I do fish now for carp and the Englisch way for 34 years… I caught 50s in 8 European countries and 40s in eleven.. I simply love carp and carpfishing but I do also a bit specimen hunting and fly fishing! Due to some health issues my fishing suffers a lot recently but also this will be better again in future!”
“Again, where should I start… The three mats are design wise maybe familiar cause I copied twice myself and one time Jamie Smith. The Flat Mat is down to the old Jamie Smith / Nix mat. So roughly 25 years old! But I changed it a bit and add a rim to it! The second mat is a copy of my Taska Surecare mat! And the third, the WPM XL is a copy of my Nylon TransCarp Mat, which I still sell! So three copies and what? The secret is that all three are fully waterproof! The whole mats are made of sealed PVC (Tarpaulin) and gives complete waterproofness! Yes, they are a bit more expensive but they are made to last! We decided not to use a net at the bottom, so water can be filed in the WPM and XL! Due to the materials used, they belong to the safest mats around! We give a Flat Mat and a WPM Mat away to two of your readers/customers!”
That’s mega buddy, we would like to give them away at the end of the month February to two of our customers in the way we did our competitions last year: anyone buying anything from our monkeyclimber.bigcartel.com site during this month enters the comp automatically, my kid will draw two winners at the end of the month!
“Fair enough! Be lucky!”