Putting “Fun” In Guns
Selling firearms — or running a range — is serious business. Fail to do even one bit of paperwork correctly, leave an I undotted or a T uncrossed, and it could land you in a world of hurt.
While you’re taking your business seriously, have some levity with what’s on the shelves. Alongside core products — such as guns, ammo and hunting gear — stock some inventory that’s purely just for fun.
CampCo
One company with a wide array of fun products for gun stores and shooting ranges is CampCo. Founded by Motti Slodowitz in 1991, CampCo has a 25-year history of manufacturing items with a sense of humor as well as a strong inventory of mainstream shooting and tactical gear.
Emily Osorio, purchasing director for CampCo, said Slodowitz is the brains behind all the company’s “fun” products. They include barware and kitchen products, toys, puzzles and pillows styled like various firearms.
For the kitchen, CampCo has a range of products including cookie cutters in the shapes of an Uzi, a .50-caliber bullet, a revolver and a hand grenade, as well as egg rings for fried eggs in the shapes of a 1911 pistol and a revolver. Other kitchen novelties include a 50-caliber fork for cooking hot dogs over coals, red and yellow plastic hand grenade condiment dispensers and shotgun shell salt and pepper sets.
Slodowitz’s ingenuity doesn’t stop in the kitchen. Have an itchy back? CampCo has a .50-caliber back scratcher to scratch it.
Or maybe you have a customer who wants his gun-themed décor to extend throughout the house. Perhaps he’d like a revolver toilet paper holder filled with bullet-printed toilet paper or a revolver-cylinder penholder for his desk.
Then there are the pillows. Shaped like rifles, revolvers, pistols and a Tavor rifle, they’re big enough for sleeping or adding a “gunny” touch to the living room.
The really fun stuff, though, is for the game room. CampCo has four firearms models made of Lego-style building blocks: a sniper rifle, machine gun, shotgun and a pistol. If your customer is more of a puzzle guy, CampCo offers wooden puzzles in two styles of rubber-band guns, six 3D knives, a revolver and a shotgun.
Osorio noted both the building blocks and wooden puzzles — which come with instructions — are big sellers for the company.“If the customer loses their copy, we can send them a PDF,” she stated. “Our mugs are good sellers also.”
Mugs come shaped like grenades, with brass knuckle and pistol handles, and shaped like shotgun shells.
The most popular category of their novelty items, according to Osorio, is barware, which includes shot glasses modeled after .50-caliber rounds, shotgun shells and revolvers.
“Don’t overlook the tactical stockings for Christmas,” she added. “Those are seasonal, but they’re very popular at Christmastime.”
And there’s always the Gatling gun bubble maker for outside during the warm months of the year.
GunFun Shooting Targets
Changing gears to products for shooting ranges, GunFun Shooting Targets provides enough different paper targets and shooting games to keep anyone entertained on the range. Originally a printing company, GunFun utilizes fluorescent inks and bright white paper to produce eye-popping targets that make shots easy to see.
Targets range in size from 9.5″x12″ up to 35″x45″. Categories include animals with vital organs, blacklight targets, weird creatures and, of course, we can’t forget zombies.
One category of targets, “Games,” mimics old-style games you’d find at a carnival or circus. Shooters can take aim at tree rats (squirrels), cornhole bags and a target, bowling pins, dart boards, cards in a deck, pool balls, sharks or the broad side of a barn. Another category, “Holidays,” has themed Valentine’s, Halloween, Christmas and birthday targets.
For the more serious shooter, GunFun also has traditional silhouette and qualification targets, as well as targets for IDPA, IPSC and USPSA. They also produce plastic and cardboard hangers in a variety of configurations.
Parris Manufacturing Company
Parris Manufacturing Company’s line of toys actually began with producing training rifles for the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy in World War II. At the start of the war, when draftees were being sent to training camps, there weren’t enough rifles available to train them. Parris Manufacturing was already experienced in woodworking, so the Department of Defense asked them to produce more than 2 million wooden dummy training rifles for training draftees until enough real rifles could be manufactured.
After WWII ended, the company switched from making dummy rifles to producing toy rifles and pistols, including frontier and cowboy pistols and rifles. All of the replicas in the line are based on historical firearms, including those used by frontiersmen and those used during the American Revolution.
In 2019, Parris Manufacturing rebranded as Parris Toys but maintained its focus on replica toy guns. Besides replica firearms, Parris Toys also makes a Galactic series of futuristic guns, as well as cowboy hats, targets, toy law enforcement badges, bow and arrow sets and other classic wooden toys such as a walking-stick duck and bear, a stick horse and a dolphin pull toy.
Aaron Smith is the toy buyer at Farm King, which keeps its six stores across Illinois and Iowa stocked with a healthy inventory from Parris Toys. Smith shared their toys are quite popular with customers.
“They’re replicas so a lot of them look very realistic, but of course with the orange tips to indicate they’re toys,” he said. “And they make a lot of noise, so they’re popular with little kids.”
According to Smith, what Farm King sells the most of is replacement caps.
“We sell a ton of those,” he noted. “People buy the toys, and the kids use them over and over again. So, they’re toys that are really being used. They aren’t toys that are under the tree and then the day after Christmas it’s forgotten.”
These are the same cap guns those of us who are in our 60s and 70s played with when we were kids.
“Most of the other toy guns in the market are electronic,” Smith observed. “They make sounds or they shoot darts or something like that. These are the old-fashioned cap guns. They’re noisemakers.”
Mixing In Fun
Take your business seriously and be sure you do all your paperwork and follow all ATF’s regulations.
But while following the rules, have some fun with your inventory. This will drive dollars toward the bottom line and put a smile on your customers’ faces at the same time.
For more info:
CampCo.com
GunFun.com
ParrisToys.com