What is this all about?

[Warden247]

Found this on the Avery Outdoors site. Can some one clarify if this is true or not.
Here is one of the FA full body goose decoys being "carved". Can you see what she is doing? She is covering a GHG Active-Style full body Canada decoy with clay or resin so she can re-texture it and give it a slightly different look. Fred spent 200+ hours carving that decoy and its heads from wood blocks, and we have sit here knowing that some Chinese girl turned it into what you now see advertised as "Jeff Foiles Signature Series Full Body Goose Decoys by Final Approach". Unbelievable. I will admit that I was angry about all of this at first, but now I am mostly embarrassed for them. If they can sleep at night, then who am I to question their actions? We will keep on doing it the only way we know how which is innovation, design and good ol' fashioned hard work. We hope you guys will recognize our efforts.

[Kelly Rees]

Warden, I am working to clear this information up. Heres the information to the best of my knowlege.

Hiyang does manufacture Final Approach decoys. They also manufactured copies of GHG decoys to try to sell to Avery. If you read Tom's post over there he mentions something to that effect.

Quote Tom Matthews

"They made unauthorized molds of our molded decoys several years ago"

As far as that woman covering a GHG to make an FA decoy goes, it makes more sense to me that that pic is of her carving an unauthorized mold of a GHG. Since the decoy in the pic is a GHG...doesnt that make a little more sense?

There are differences in the sizes of the decoys that would make it impossible to just put resin or clay over an existing decoy...if that were the case the FA decoys would be quite large or at least larger than the GHG. Not the case, some are smaller according to my information.

Also look at the area in that pic where the head attatches compared to the FA feeder. Not even close, the FA decoy body sticks out much farther than that.

Thats the best I can do for you at this point, I will have more information as it becomes available. I hate to speculate on any of this because it affects people business, I would much rather post up factual information than to slam someones product based on speculation.

[Warden247]

Thanks for the clarification and timely response.