Trapper Arne started on April 1, 2004. That's the day Trapper Arne opened its first website offering of crawfish traps for sale to the Internet buying public. When my family and I moved to Arizona, we were delighted to find crawfish in the Phoenix irrigation canals. For a Swede, that was Manna from Heaven. Soon I learned how to catch these delicious little creatures while walking with a dip net along the canals in Phoenix. But soon I also found that Arizona lakes often were filled with these delicious crustaceans. After all, that's where the water for the canals came from.

That tempted me into making my first hand made boxy crayfish traps. Not exactly things of beauty, but they worked surprisingly well. Soon I also managed to persuade my brother in Stockholm to send me a supply of Swedish crayfish traps all the way to us in Arizona. We soon named them Jackpots.

That was the beginning. Soon I also discovered, while surfing the Internet, that there were people selling crayfish traps on the Worldwide Web. As I had already made some crayfish traps for myself, it dawned upon me, 'Why not make traps and also sell them on the Internet?' Said and done. Soon I had designed my first Internet crayfish trap, the Trapper, and not long after I had laboriously learned the HTML language to design myself a web page for selling crayfish traps. Trapper Arne was born.

Both my wife and I first had lukewarm expectations for this new venture into the abyss of cyberspace. For years I had caught crayfish using the traps my brother sent me. A dozen Jackpot traps that I still use after 50 years of use. Then, on the Internet, I located some websites that sold crayfish traps. Some of the trap designs I saw intrigued me, and I started making similar traps in my garage. Some of these traps worked so well I decided that, maybe, I could also make traps and sell them on a dot-com website. A crayfish trap specialist in Washington state encouraged me to take the plunge. And plunge I did. He also became my first customer, starting a long line of trap buyers who clambered to buy my Arizona made Trapper crayfish traps. Soon my garage began looking like a factory, and my inventory of Trapper crayfish traps grew. And so did our sales. As the orders trickled in, I made daily trips to either the post office or to UPS to see my traps go out to customers all over the market.

Soon we had expanded our designs to both home made traps and those we import from across the seas, especially from Sweden. First we had the Trapper. Then the imported worldwide well known Trappy. We also offered an open trap that went over so well with the small fry. And we expanded further and then soon came the larger trap named the Trappy XL followed by the funny little Cray Shack trap. Then we experimentally developed our own design for an extra large trap that we called the Jumbo. I caught a lot of our own crayfish using this extra large trap. The best producing trap we ever offered.

Our dot.com web site grew and we were kept busy both making traps and importing them from my home country. We increased our crayfish related offerings by adding a movie showing how we catch crayfish, we added artificially manufactured crayfish bait. crayfish trap trot line kits, bait boxes and crawfish boil from Louisiana.

But time marches on, and one day I realized that I was old enough to retire on my laurels. I talked son Peter into taking over the business, and together with his wife Tracey and, on occasion, daughter Annika, Trapper Arne moved to Scottsdale where this shellfish trap company is still going strong keeping people happy while singing crawdad drinking songs.