A couple of points here.
First, don’t conflate Brands and Manufacturers. Most brands, especially the smaller ones are not vertically integrated. In other words the brand doesn’t own manufacturing, they merely outsource to a hook manufacturer. In many cases a given hook manufacturer might be producing hooks for several different brands. (There are a lot of hook brands found in the consumer space that are not sold in the U.S). As a segway to the next more salient point, manufacturers produce hooks based on a set of specifications provided by the brand. The hook’s design is the brand’s responsibility, not the manufacturers.
As with a huge majority of products, the recipe or specifications for the product is proprietary and a closely guarded element of the brand’s stable of products. Making exact specifications public impacts the brand’s competitive advantage. Indeed, products can be reverse engineered once they hit the market, but that is typically an expensive endeavor as there are usually elements of a specification—i.e. manufacturing process— that are not revealed in the final product. One of the things I learned from Joe Mathis at Firehole was that as a Design Engineer in the technology space, he was very protective of his design specifications. He had designed another fly fishing product at one time where the specs were not protected and it was immediately pirated once it hit the market. Giving just a small portion of the specs away can seriously impact competitive advantage. There are 24 hook models in the Firehole line and 13 have Patents Pending. You don’t give away your designs if you intend to patent a product design. Even the big boys like TMC, Mustad, Eagle Claw and Partridge for example don’t publish detailed dimensional information on individual hook models/sizes for good reason.
