The urchin bait wave, from the factory side
An urchin-style soft bait sold out in the US market in 2026 and was copied across the industry within weeks.
- Sports Illustrated reported the bait sold out and was "instantly copied to death"; Wired2Fish published a make-your-own guide because stock was unavailable.
- A soft bait needs no steel tooling, so the shape can be copied from photographs within weeks. The formula cannot be seen and is copied later, if at all.
- Our Soft Lure sample holds six listings from US$0.20 to US$3.75 at MOQ 50 to 1,000 - an 18.8x spread inside one sub-type.
If you went looking for a Coike in June, you already know how that went.
It is a soft bait covered in spines, like a sea urchin, made by Hideup. It turned up at the Bassmaster Classic as one of two mystery baits, and then it was simply gone - sold out, back-ordered, and on the secondary market at prices nobody wanted to pay. It turned up at the 2026 Bassmaster Classic as one of two mystery baits, and then it was gone. Sports Illustrated ran the headline Sold Out and Instantly Copied to Death. Wired2Fish went further and published a guide to making your own, on the grounds that you were not going to find one to buy.
I spend more time in factories in Weihai than I do on the water, and what I see in this story is not a hit product. It is a purchasing problem, and it is one that repeats every couple of years.
How fast the copies arrive
A soft bait does not need a steel mould. A silicone tool costs a fraction of an injection tool, and an outline can be copied from a photograph. The practical window between a bait going viral and copies appearing on shelves is now measured in weeks, not seasons.
That is the part everyone notices. The part that matters is what the copy does and does not carry across.
A soft bait's shape is visible. Its formula is not. So copies arrive matching the outline first, and the feel second, if it arrives at all.
Our own sample shows the shape of that gap. Across six Soft Lure listings, unit prices run from US$0.20 to US$3.75 - an 18.8x spread inside a single sub-type, with MOQ floors from 50 to 1,000. From a photograph, those six baits are hard to tell apart.
The two fields a copy cuts first
A soft bait's cost sits in three places: the plastisol, the salt, and the labour. The first two are what decide how it fishes.
The plastisol. PVC plastisol is sold in grades. Plasticiser ratio sets how soft the bait is and how much it flexes. UV stabiliser sets whether it survives an afternoon in the sun or goes hard in a car over a summer. Colour carrier sets whether the colour reads as translucent or as paint. A cheaper plastisol is soft out of the bag too. It is three months later that the difference shows.
The salt. This is the one that decides whether you can use the bait at all. Salt is what gives a soft plastic its density, and density is what sets sink rate.
- More salt, higher specific gravity, faster sink - deep water, current
- Less salt, lower specific gravity, slow flutter - shallow water, pressured fish
Salt is also the cheapest filler in the bait. A copy that has to hit a lower price cuts there first. The result is a bait that matches the original on the shelf and falls through the water at a different speed - which means the retrieve you learned on the original no longer works.
That is what "copied to death" actually means. Not that the copies look wrong. That they look right and fish differently, and you cannot tell at the point of sale.
Three things a buyer can do
Ask for specific gravity, not softness. "How soft is it" produces an adjective. Ask for specific gravity, and for sink rate in centimetres per second. A supplier who has measured either one will give you a number. One who has not will describe the bait again.
Buy two consecutive batches, not one sample. Filler dosing drifts between runs. Two batches sunk side by side in a tank will show whether the factory controls that drift or leaves it to whoever is on the line that shift. This is not necessarily dishonesty - it is dosing tolerance - but it is the difference between a supplier you can write a specification with and one you cannot.
Put salt content on the order, not on the packaging. This is the one that pays. The MOQ floor on soft plastics in our sample is 50 pieces, which is low enough to trial a run. Write the salt content with a tolerance, the specific gravity, the sink rate, and the method used to test them. Once those are on the order, a batch that misses them is a deviation you can raise rather than a difference you have to absorb.
The wave will pass
It always does. A shape gets hot for a reason, the industry makes it, and two years later it is a standard option on the shelf.
What does not pass is the underlying problem. The outline of a soft bait is public the moment it sells; the formula never is. So the buying question was never can I find this bait. It is can I say which version of it I want.
Say it, and a supplier cannot sell you the wrong one. Cannot say it, and the only lever left is price - and the end of that road is a bait that sinks at the wrong speed.