Santa Cruz SBDC

EZ Puller

“Everybody that they had on the program brought something in that was usable to all of us.”

All Client Stories


EZ Puller is a family-owned and operated business in Santa Cruz. They manufacture electric crab and shrimp pullers, salmon downriggers for sport and commercial fishermen, as well as crab and shrimp traps. The way the make their product is by hand-building each item in the client’s shop and then reviewing each one for quality craftmanship. The son is the fabricator, the wife is the assembler and shipping while Guy takes over the shipping and the selling part of the business.

After moving to California from Oregon, Guy would spend his summers working on sport fishing boats, which then evolved into his getting a license and running a boat. Later on, he moved to Capitola, where he would take people out on his boat, for fishing, whale watching, and sightseeing.

When the Richards family realized there was a growing need for products for the sport fishermen. After they came up with their idea, it was time to find a smart way to market and deliver the product. In the beginning, their product was tailored to recreational fishermen as a way to more easily pull heavy crab traps, but in time, they started selling their product to small commercial salmon fishermen. Finally, they also found an opportunity to sell to the government.

After hearing about our Clicks2Bricks program, Guy thought it would be the perfect opportunity to put their website up so they could lean more towards the retail side, as opposed to just doing wholesales, which is what they had been focusing on previously. Guy’s vision was to expand his business to the Gulf Coast and the East Coast, without affecting his commercial clients at the time.

Guy’s hope with the C2B program was to set up special shipping rules for individual programs, combine 2 ecommerce stores, and to set up automated emails for non-converting users. To do so, our advisor Andrew Walker fist pointed Guy to some Shopify apps that could address his needs, while also guiding him through his options for combining 2 eCommerce sites. By moving the site to a Shopify platform, their products would be more easily accessible to customers that could just order them online.

Building the website on Shopify, included working on features like navigation, interior pages and a home page, as well as setting up new shipping rules to address larger items and shipping to the non-continental US.

Finally, acknowledging the growing power of social media, our team advised Guy to set up and Instagram feed to generate more traffic. In order to get some feedback on the newly crafted website, it was time to carry out the process of software testing to ensure its effectiveness, which involved doing quality assurance, site testing, running test transactions and experimenting with different shipping scenarios.

The program definitely yielded results because after 2 days of launching the site, sales were already being recorded, and after completing the course, the Richards family hopes to take all the knowledge gained from C2B and apply it to their new website they are working on: True Pacific.