Beyond The Gun Rack

Before reading this, please take a moment to put on your “customer hat” and evaluate
your business from their perspective. Does your current customer base visit your store because you sell firearms or because you sell a “firearms lifestyle?”

Terms like “everyday carry” (EDC), hunting, concealed carry and competitive target shooting allude to the fact people aren’t patronizing your business because you just sell guns. They’re trying to engage with a lifestyle, be it security or recreationally minded.

Cast A Wider Net (Pun Intended)

In times of lagging sales, lower footfall numbers and narrowing margins, we need to take a step back and fundamentally understand this lifestyle mantra and give ourselves permission to go “beyond the gun rack” and explore new arenas of products and services.

This can help us not only engage more with our current customer base but also connect with new customers. As the saying goes, to catch more fish, you need to cast a wider net (pun intended).

So, yes, my pun was to open the idea of what we will call “industry-adjacent” products. In many parts of the country, we see a peak in interest in fishing at the exact same time the firearm industry sees its normal slump in the spring and early summer.

If you think about it, it’s likely a big swath of the summer’s lack of sales is because our firearm customers are out fishing. If we view our shops as lifestyle stores, then why not cater to the devoted customers who want to do business with us — but can’t — because we’re not offering what they want during the spring and summer?

This doesn’t mean it’s necessary to carry fishing tackle year-round, but why not offer a seasonal assortment and give customers more reasons to shop with you? Here’s a list of some other industry-adjacent product categories worth a look:

• Archery
• Watches
• Precious Metals
• Food/Meal Preparation Tools
• Knives/Cutlery
• Outdoor Cooking/Grills/Smokers

Leverage Seasonal Goods

Above is just a cursory list and will vary depending on your customers’ lifestyles. The key to heading down this path is threefold.

First, find a source of these products that allows you to resell them in a profitable way. Some of these products may already be available from current vendors, or may require a few phone calls or emails to build those connections.

Second, target when it’s appropriate to inventory these items. Is it a year-round category or seasonal? If it’s seasonal, when is the right time to order products to have them in stock at the peak sales season?

Third, how will you clear out the inventory when it is past peak season? Depending on the product, options as simple as eBay or other online auction houses help to rid leftover inventory within a week and use the liberated cash for the next industry-adjacent assortment relevant to the season. The key: play the ups and downs of seasonal goods and leverage them profitably.

Upscale Or Downscale?

Speaking of ups and downs, we can diversify our offerings once again by casting a wider net while staying solidly within the firearms industry. The key is to explore two strategic directions: upscale or downscale.

Take a long, honest look at your current assortment and see if there are price points customers largely ignore. Consider who those customers might be and build an assortment around them. Lower income? Independently wealthy? Students? All these profiles have very specific price points at which they engage based on their budgets.

In my experience, too many shops do not cater to the high-end clientele enough. These are customers with near recession-proof discretionary cash. This market is a steady burn and doesn’t see the radical spikes and dips like the rest of our industry experiences and can generate significantly more profit dollars per transaction.

The challenge here is the need to approach a national customer base, not just local. Pull this feat off and there will be a predictable (and profitable) new sector of your business.

Change … Something

Lastly, change how you see existing inventory and pitch it in a fundamentally different way. In these tumultuous economic times with lots of change in the import/ export markets, the following saying attributed to self-help guru Tony Robbins speaks true: “By changing nothing, nothing changes.”

We can absolutely engage with the same customers, with the same inventory, in a fundamentally different way. Here’s an example. Over the past couple of years, ammunition manufacturers have been clearly telegraphing a consistent message of continued ammunition price increases for the foreseeable future. Double down on this with the increases in material costs and we can easily envision ammunition no different than gold or silver. Yes, market ammunition as an investment!

Create an investment program where customers make regular purchases of ammunition as nothing more than an investment tool. When we see the year-over-year potential for increases in ammunition prices of 25% or more, ammunition suddenly becomes a practical (and useful) investment device.

You could do the same for “blue chip” collectibles such as Smith & Wesson revolvers, Colt Single Action Army models or any number of other timeless collectibles with the spin of them being an alternate form of investment.

The point here: Broaden the horizon and fundamentally admit you’re here to make profits. Sometimes, we must adjust where those profits are sourced from. Stop thinking of your shop as a gun shop, and think more of it as a lifestyle facility. Everything from there becomes a whole lot easier to dynamically adjust to market conditions.

Have a thought? Weigh in! Send a note to: editor@shootingindustry.com.

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