Why I Built Pikeline — Founder Story by Téo Petitgenet

This started on the bank of the Mosel last July.

I had been chasing pike for most of the morning, missed two solid follows, lost one at the boat side, and by 11 a.m. my cotton t-shirt was soaked through. By 2 p.m. it was dry and stiff. By 4 p.m. it was wet again. I had a sunburn line on the back of my neck where the collar sat low. My forearms were red. The shirt smelled.

I drove home and started looking, seriously this time, for what other European anglers were wearing. What I found is the reason this company exists.

What was already out there

The American brands are the loud answer. Huk, Pelagic, AFTCO. They make legitimately good performance shirts. The fabric does what it claims, the UPF ratings are real, the construction holds up. But ordering one to Luxembourg is a three-week wait through customs, the cuts are designed for American body proportions, and almost every design looks like it was made for a Florida bass tournament. Wide screen prints, large logos, color schemes that scream marlin trip rather than pike on a quiet morning lake.

The European side has Decathlon and a few other entry-level options. They are functional. They are also visibly entry-level. The fabric pills after a few washes, the UPF protection is rarely independently certified, and you are not going to feel proud wearing one if you have spent serious time learning to fish.

Patagonia makes a fishing line. It is excellent. It is also priced for people who have other budgets, and most of their fishing styles are barely distributed outside their US site. Filson is heritage and durable but heavier than you want above 25 degrees.

So the real shelf for the European pike angler looks like this. Cheap and uninspiring on one end. Expensive and hard to get on the other end. A long, generic middle of Amazon-tier polyester shirts with random graphics.

I bought a few of the middle-tier shirts and tried them through August. They did the job. They also looked like nothing I would want to wear.

The decision

I am twenty-four years old. I have spent most of my free time since I was a kid on or near water. Pike fishing specifically is what I came back to as soon as I could choose my own time. There is something about the patience it asks for, the strange combination of stillness and sudden violence, the way a fish you cannot see decides whether you are worth answering. Early mornings on the Mosel side, occasional trips into Holland for the bigger water, weekends in the Belgian Ardennes.

If I was going to spend that much of my life dressed for pike fishing, I wanted to be dressed for it on purpose.

The decision to actually build something happened over a long weekend in September. I made a list of everything I wanted in a shirt and started sourcing fabric. The list had three non-negotiables.

UPF 50+, independently certified. Not "UV blocking" stamped on a label. There is a real testing standard, AS/NZS 4399, and the Skin Cancer Foundation maintains a list of fabrics that pass it. If a fabric was not on that list, I did not want to use it.

Wicking, not absorbing. This is what cotton fails at. The blend has to pull sweat from your skin to the outer fabric surface where it evaporates. The cooling that happens during evaporation is what makes a long-sleeve in summer actually cooler than a short-sleeve cotton t-shirt. The fabric I landed on is 90 percent polyester, 10 percent spandex, 180 gsm, with what the mill calls PURE-tech moisture-wicking treatment.

Anti-microbial. The reason synthetic shirts smell after one day of sweat is bacterial growth. There are silver-ion treatments that prevent it. I wanted them in the fabric from the start, not as a wash-in additive.

After enough samples to fill a drawer, I had a fabric that hit all three. Then came the design problem.

The five designs

I did not want to make one shirt and call it a brand. I also did not want to make twenty designs and dilute the idea.

I made five.

Strike Blue. The first one I designed and the one I wore most during testing. It is the most direct: rod, lure, a moment of violence in the water. It belongs to the morning sessions when you have walked the bank for two hours and the first cast finally connects.

Freshwater. Bold and graphic. The least pike-specific of the five and intentionally so. It is the one I wear when I am not actually fishing, when the shirt has to also work for dinner in town or a drive somewhere.

Ocean Wave. Built around the way a pike moves at the strike. It is the most dynamic of the prints and the one that took the most iteration to get right. Most fishing graphics are static. This one is not.

PikeLine Classic. The minimalist version. No big print, no graphic moment. The shirt for people who like the technical fabric but do not want to advertise it. This is the one I expect to be the quiet bestseller.

Forest Camo. A clean camouflage, designed for bank fishing in heavy cover. Greens that fit the European reed and willow margins, not American desert browns.

All five are built from the same fabric, the same construction, the same UPF certification. The differences are visual. The performance is identical.

Why "Pikeline"

The name is direct. Pike. Line. Pike fishing. The fish I have spent the most time chasing and the line that connects me to it.

I wanted a brand name that did not require explanation. Most fishing apparel names are abstract or borrowed from other sports. Pikeline tells you what it is in two syllables.

It also tells me something. Every time I write the name, I am reminded what this brand is supposed to be. Not a generic apparel company that happens to do fishing shirts. A fishing apparel company specifically for the people who target pike and the other predators that swim with them. Perch, zander, the bigger lake bass. The audience is specific. The shirts are specific. The brand should be too.

What this is, and what it is not

Pikeline is not trying to be everything. It is not going to make waders or boots or rods. It is not going to do collaborations with influencers I do not personally respect. It is not going to chase whatever the algorithm rewards this quarter.

What it is going to do is make the best long-sleeve performance shirt for pike anglers I can make, year over year. The S1 2026 collection is five designs. The next collection will refine the fabric and add or replace designs based on what actually worked. The third collection will probably be when we start adding adjacent pieces, gloves or buffs or whatever the testing tells us needs to exist.

I am a one-person operation right now. Every email that comes to contact@pikeline.shop is read by me. Every order that ships in June will go out of a small space in Luxembourg with my hands packing it.

If you fish pike seriously and you have been waiting for a European brand that takes that seriously, this is what I built.