If you have landed here after seeing a small black lure go past on Instagram, you are in the right place. The lure is the Mussel Mania, and it is made in Melbourne by Rift Design.
We stock it. We did not design it, we did not pour it, and we are not going to write about it as though we did. This is a post about someone else's product, because how it gets made is worth knowing, and because the brand making it deserves the credit rather than the shop that puts it on a shelf.
Who Rift Design is
Rift Design is a Melbourne brand founded by an industrial designer who fishes, which is a less common combination than it sounds. Plenty of people who fish have an idea for a lure. Far fewer can take that idea through form, tooling and finish and come out the other end with something they can make again the same way.
Here is how Rift Design describes itself, in its own words:
Rift is a small local brand built around fishing, design, and community.
Design sits in the middle of that sentence on purpose. It is not filler when design is what the business does for a living.
The rest of it looks the way a lot of independent Australian brands look from the inside. Development happens around everything else, because nobody hands a new brand a clear run at it. Colours get mixed and tested in house rather than sent out to be specified by somebody who does not fish.
What "made locally" actually means here
Rift Design puts it like this: each lure is designed, poured, finished, checked, assembled, and packed locally in Melbourne.
That is six verbs, and they are worth going through one at a time, because "Australian brand" gets used pretty loosely across the tackle trade. Often it means the branding is Australian and a factory somewhere else runs the moulds, alongside a dozen other labels using the same blanks. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just a different thing to what is happening here.
- Designed. The shape is a decision somebody made, not a catalogue blank with a new paint job on it.
- Poured. The resin bodies come out of Rift Design's own moulds in Melbourne.
- Finished. Colour and finish go on by hand, one at a time.
- Checked. Somebody looks at each one before it goes in a packet. That is the step that quietly disappears at scale.
- Assembled. Hardware goes on locally, not as a part-built body that turns up finished from elsewhere.
- Packed. The last hands on it before yours are the ones that made it.
The lure itself, briefly
The Mussel Mania is a 33mm, 4.0g sinking vibe. The body is a compact hard shape inspired by the Australian black mussel, with a shell-like profile and a flat top that creates a subtle vibration on the lift. It is tuned to sink with a controlled natural flutter rather than a wide spiral, which matters when you are fishing tight against structure and you want it going down where you put it.
There is an internal rattle for low light and dirty water. Construction is stainless through-wire in a durable resin body. It is built for bream and estuary species, around rock bars, breakwalls, reef, pylons, wharves, marina edges, oyster racks and shell beds. Anywhere mussels actually grow, basically, which is a refreshingly literal bit of lure design.
Rift Design's own instruction on fishing it is short enough to quote in full:
Cast it tight to pontoons, pylons, boat hulls, rock walls, oyster racks or other areas where bream are feeding. Let it sink, pause, then work it with slow, subtle lifts.
There is more to say about the pause and the lift than belongs in a post about the brand, so that sits separately over on the Field Notes blog.
Why we stock it
Duskie designs and makes 12V gear in Victoria. Anderson-style connectors, trailer sockets, the unglamorous end of a 12V build. Lures are not our trade, and we are not going to pretend we arrived here through some clever bit of category analysis.
The honest version is shorter. Rift Design makes a good thing, properly, and does it the same way we do ours, which is slowly and with its own name on it. Privately owned Aussie businesses supporting each other, and we reckon that is exactly how it should work. When we can put a brand like that in front of people who would otherwise never hear of it, that seems like a straightforwardly good use of a shelf.
We are the stockist here, nothing more than that, and we are happy to be it.
The three colourways
All three are the same 33mm, 4.0g body. The difference is the finish.
Jet BlackClean black shell profile for natural presentations.
Amber BlackWarm shell tones with subtle gold highlights.
Blue Black UVBlue tones with a UV-reactive finish.Where to find Rift Design
If this is the first you have heard of the brand, go to the source rather than to us. Rift Design is putting the work into its own channels and that is where the good stuff lands first, the testing footage, the colours still in R&D, the fish.
- Website. riftdesign.com.au
- Instagram. @riftdesign_aus
- TikTok. @riftdesign
- Facebook. riftdesign.aus
- YouTube. @RIFTDESIGN_AUS
Rift Design is also stocked by Compleat Angler Ringwood, so if you would rather hold one before you buy it, that is an option too.
The short version
Rift Design is a privately owned Melbourne brand run by an industrial designer who fishes. The Mussel Mania is a 33mm, 4.0g sinking vibe built on the shape of an Australian black mussel, stainless through-wire, internal rattle, made for bream around the hard stuff. Every one of them is designed, poured, finished, checked, assembled and packed in Melbourne, and every one is slightly different because a person finished it. We stock it because it is a good thing made properly by a business we rate. Go and follow them.