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The Man Who Started It All - Roger Grundman


Roger’s History began in Faribault, MN in 1924. Born the youngest of 4 children to Michael Grundman and Anna Roy. 
When Roger was a young boy the family moved to Vincennes, Indiana because his father was hired at the Brown shoe factory located there.  
After graduating from high school in 1942 he joined the Army and by the spring of 1944 he was in Great Britain with thousands of other G.I.’s preparing for the D-day invasion.  But due to illness he was shipped stateside and ended up at Fort Snelling until the wars end. 
Roger enrolled at the University of Minnesota and studied aeronautical engineering.  After graduation he sought a job with several aircraft builders, but life took him in a different direction. 
He landed a job at the 3M Company starting in abrasives engineering. He had various positions in research and product development which gave him the opportunity to work on his own ideas. Obviously, in our opinion at least, the Flex-Fletch Vane was his best idea.  

Flex-Fletch Products Was Born

Pretty soon the Flex-Fletch vane business out-grew the garage and it moved to a small shop in Vadnais Heights, MN. 

In the late 70’s the manufacturing plant moved to a larger space with a separate office area in Arden Hills.  It was during this time that Roger met Paul Dodge of Menomonie, Wisconsin. He is the designer of the Pro-Nock, which Flex-Fletch began distributing worldwide.

In 1984 Roger bought land in White Bear Township. He designed the Flex-Fletch production plant for the future. He knew part of that future was to engineer molds with very tight tolerances and so he went about it with the focus of an aeronautical engineer.  Roger bought a Bridgeport milling machine, took his newly engineered mold plans and began making a new set of molds. Like everything Roger has designed, the molds are still used in today’s production. When something is designed right, it lasts and lasts, just like the Flex-Fletch Vanes.

New vane sizes and colors were being added almost yearly and, in 1985, we added Flex Bond glue. The glue tubes were filled, clamped, and sealed using a 5 station, rotating platform designed and built by Roger.

Roger was not all work. He discovered 180 acres of land for sale near Frederic, Wisconsin that he purchased to be used as a deer hunting property. A small two story house on the property hosted many bow hunting friends and family over the next 20 years, including national archery Hall of Fame members, Ann Clark, Anne Hoyt, and Norb Mullaney. Rogers’s last hunt there was in November 2005.  Roger & Eileen donated the property to the Wisconsin Bow Hunters Association in 2006. 

Faith, Family, Friends, Hunting, and Engineering were Roger’s life passion.  He lived his life to the fullest and left a legacy that the family still honors today.