Whiplash Factory; Global Fishing Experience, Shaped into Topwater Lures

2025-12-20 2025-12-19

Ty Hasegawa

When most bass anglers first hear about a Japanese lure brand, the expectation is often the same: beautiful paint, delicate balance, and finesse-oriented action.
Whiplash Factory breaks that assumption almost immediately. Lures of this brand is designed from the global fishing experience of the designer. And it gives the uniqueness that brought the brand outstanding among the competitive Japanese lure market.

Before talking about philosophy, travel, or history, it’s better to start where anglers always start—with the lures themselves.

Note: you can see the same contents in my YouTube channel. The link to the video is here.

Three Lures That Define Whiplash Factory

Live Wire — Controlled Walking, Not Just “Walking the Dog”

At first glance, Live Wire looks like a pencil bait for walk-the-dog action. On the water, it behaves very differently.

Live Wire is designed for tight, immediate response. Short rod movements create short slides. Slight cadence changes translate instantly into direction changes. This allows anglers to keep the bait in a strike zone longer, especially when bass are following but not committing.

For bass anglers fishing pressured lakes, this matters. When fish have already seen wide, lazy walks all season, a tighter, sharper presentation can be the difference between another follower and an actual strike.

Live Wire isn’t about covering water—it’s about controlling fish behavior.

Image of Live Wire, from official product page.

Video of swimming action of Live Wire from Caranx.net is as below.

Swayward-16 — An Answer to Visual Feeding Fish

Swayward-16 is Whiplash Factory’s jointed lipless swimmer, and it reflects a very different design idea.

Instead of noise-first attraction, Swayward-16 focuses on body movement and visual presence. Its jointed construction creates a wide, natural slalom on a steady retrieve, while rod input can make it dart, roll, or hesitate.

This lure excels when bass are:

Shallow
Visually feeding
Following but refusing standard hard baits

In many areas—especially clear reservoirs, shallow flats, or post-spawn scenarios—this type of slow, visible, controlled motion can outperform both traditional wakebaits and aggressive topwaters.

There are three different sinking tipes, FLW (Floating Walker, surface), FLS (Floating Swimmer, surface-subsurface), SKS (Slow sinking). These variations gives us the advantage to make the best presentation for your target fish. The notable point in designing is that Swayward 16 achieved these multi depth presentation with the same shape. It shows the superiority in its shape design.

Lure action can be seen from the video below.

Flutterin’ Wire — Subtle Disturbance with Flash

Flutterin’ Wire sits between finesse and reaction.

It's a multitalent lure. By adding a rotating blade to a compact topwater profile, Flutterin’ Wire introduces controlled flash and vibration. The blade works to give additional attraction to its basic movement as a top water bait. In terms of top water action, it has a small cup in front to give a splash, and tiny body makes the compact turning movement with subtle twitch. Thanks to its blade, it can work with straight retrieve, too.

This lure shines in situations where:

Fish are pressured
Loud popping or rattling turns fish away

Flutterin’ Wire reflects one of Whiplash Factory’s core ideas: disturbance doesn’t have to be aggressive—it just has to be intentional.

Who Is Behind These Lures?

Whiplash Factory was founded in 1993 by Japanese angler and lure designer Kunitsugu Niinomi. From the beginning, the brand followed a simple but demanding rule:

Lures should be designed on the water, not just at the desk.

Instead of limiting testing to local Japanese lakes, Niinomi and the Whiplash Factory team took their prototypes overseas—again and again.

Mr. Kuni Niinomi in Spain, from Whiplash Factory Blog.

Have you noticed that the above featured lures are all top water? Whiplash Factory has a lot of top water lures. It is coming from his love of the nature.

Top water lures are less prone to snagging. Snagged lures are just dumb in the water, and it is nothing good for the environemnt. If you are using top water lures, you have a total control of it without caring about snagging. This is why Kuni is looking at top water lures as a priority in his development.

The Overseas Archive: Global Fishing as R&D

If you explore Whiplash Factory’s overseas archive, a clear pattern emerges. These trips were not marketing tours. They were field experiments.

The team fished:

Southeast Asian rivers and reservoirs
South American waters with unfamiliar predator behavior
European lakes and canals with different pressure patterns
US bass fisheries where fish have seen every classic lure

Each location presented new problems:

Different water clarity
Different feeding styles
Different reactions to sound, flash, and movement

Instead of redesigning lures for each region, Whiplash Factory tested how the same lures behaved—and how fish responded.

Photos below is from Mr. Kuni Niinomi's blog posts, published under Whiplash Factory official page.

What the World Taught Whiplash Factory

Across continents and species, one lesson kept repeating:

Fish don’t always respond to perfection.
They respond to disruption.

That disruption doesn’t mean chaos. It means:

Breaking rhythm
Changing direction suddenly
Adding flash or vibration at the right moment
Giving anglers precise control over those elements

This idea became the backbone of Whiplash Factory’s designs—especially evident in Live Wire’s cadence control, Swayward-16’s visual movement, and Flutterin’ Wire’s restrained flash.