Dardevle
The red-and-white striped spoon, stamped in Dearborn, Michigan by Eppinger Manufacturing since 1906.
🇺🇸 American Manufacturing
Our assessment
Company details
Where Dardevle products are made
Eppinger Manufacturing has been at 6340 Schaefer Road in Dearborn for generations. The stamping, plating and painting of the spoons happen there — a metal-working operation in a metal-working city.
The Dardevle is a piece of formed and finished metal whose action depends on the thickness profile Lou Eppinger hammered out in 1906: thinner in the middle, thicker at the edges. That geometry is the product, and it is held by tooling the company owns.
Eppinger is unusually direct about the comparison. The company says imitators “used inferior materials and farmed the work out to factories overseas in order to sell their lures for less money” — and positions its own American-made quality against exactly that.
The 1906 origin of the Eppinger tradition, the Dearborn, Michigan address, the family ownership and the American-made quality statement are all published by Eppinger on dardevle.com. Because no per-product origin statement is published for the clothing and accessories line, this profile records American Manufacturing rather than Made in USA.
The story
In 1906 Lou Eppinger spent a month alone in the Ontario wilderness with a lure of his own design: a two-ounce spoon hammered thinner in the middle and thicker at the edges. Cast into the shallows it swung side to side and nearly turned over, always righting itself.
By 1912 the prototype had become a finished lure called the Osprey, and it caught fish in quantity — pike especially. In 1918 Lou’s nephew Ed came to work in the shop. The red-and-white striped spoon that came out of that shop became one of the most copied fishing lures ever made.
Four generations later the company is still Eppinger, still in Dearborn, and still stamping over a million lures a year. Karen Eppinger was inducted into the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in 2023, joining her father Ed and her great-uncle Lou, both inducted in 1990.
The company notes, drily, that it is too busy filling orders to go fishing as often as it would like.
Why they matter
A fishing spoon is a small stamped piece of metal — about as easy a thing to copy and offshore as exists. Eppinger says one collector it knows has gathered over 300 different red-and-white striped imitations. The company kept making the original in Dearborn anyway.
Michigan metalwork is the whole story here. This is not a brand that commissioned a factory; it is a family metal shop that happened to invent a lure. The tooling, the geometry and the finish are the business.
And 120 years of one family in one American city is rare enough to be worth recording on its own terms, separate from the product.
Shop Dardevle products
Browse Dardevle spoons and lures stocked on the Buy American Campaign store.
Frequently asked questions
Are Dardevle lures made in the USA?
Eppinger Manufacturing states on its own website that it takes pride in its history of American-made quality and contrasts itself with imitators who moved production overseas. The lures are made at the company’s Dearborn, Michigan works. No origin statement is published for the clothing and accessories line, so this profile records American Manufacturing.
Where is Dardevle located?
Eppinger Manufacturing, 6340 Schaefer Road, Dearborn, Michigan 48126.
Who owns Dardevle?
The Eppinger family, now in its fourth generation. Karen Eppinger is the third family member inducted into the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame.
How old is the Dardevle design?
Lou Eppinger designed the original hammered spoon in 1906 and turned it into a finished lure, the Osprey, by 1912.