QA Outdoors
With the explosion we’ve seen this year, first when January 1 hit and now with the Texas ruling, you’ve seen substantial growth that has increased even further than you could have planned. There are also more first-time suppressor buyers coming into the market. What has surprised you most about the market so far this year?
Mike Aland
Anecdotally, the thing that always surprises me about the silencer market is that just at the point where you start thinking, “Okay, we’ve got this dialed,” something happens.
Lately we’ve been on a winning streak. From our shop side, prior to the Texas ruling, we actually had a pretty good handle on meeting demand and arranging our business to meet that demand.
Then this happens, and now we’re like, “All right, I guess we’re going to have to go back and retool a little bit on some of this.”
That’s probably my biggest surprise: There’s always a surprise.
In the more than a decade that I’ve been in and around the silencer market, it doesn’t follow a normal business cycle. There’s not a predictable trend line because there is legislation and there are laws surrounding it. As you cut some of those away, it opens up, and as more get added, it trims it down.
I think the surprise is the surprise.
QA Outdoors
I see this period not as the golden age of suppressors, but as the gold-rush age of suppressors. You’ve got established companies succeeding, growing, and meeting demand, but you also had a couple hundred new companies come into the market last year, and even more at the beginning of this year.
That increases competition, but SilencerCo is positioned differently because of its ability to scale, as well as its past experience of going through the ups and downs that these new companies have never seen or addressed. Add to that the fact that, as you said, we haven’t even scratched the surface of the potential suppressor market.
So is this increased competition something you spend much time worrying about?
Mike Aland
No. And I’ll also give a little credit to consumers.
I’ll give a small example. HPA was so damaging because people had this hope that the bill was going to get passed and you could just walk in and buy a silencer. So they stopped buying. As soon as they realized it was a real possibility, the thinking became, “I’m going to wait six months because it’s not worth the form time. It’s not worth the dollars.”
We anticipated some of that after the form times went down, and we talked about it. But what bore out was that the silencer consumer is becoming more savvy and understanding how this industry works.
From July 4 (2025) until January 1, we were pedal-down. There was never a slowdown during that time. Some of the dealers offered layaway programs to avoid the $200 tax.
QA Outdoors
And, in some cases, promotions where the dealer or manufacturer ate the tax. That had to have spurred a lot of sales that otherwise might have waited until January.
Mike Aland
Absolutely.
You couple that with silencer buyers thinking, “I know if I wait until January 1 for the Scythe-Ti or this other product that’s selling really hot, I might not ever see one again. So I better buy now because there’s so much demand that there will be a scarcity of product.”
It’s kind of fun to see companies adapt to these different market conditions. Consumers, at least in my personal estimation, are responding in a similar way.
Before, it was kind of like, “All right, guys, start buying.” But now they understand: “If I don’t buy right now, I might not have a chance to get it. It might take me 12 months to get this can that I want. I’m going to end up settling for something I don’t want because it’s available.”
QA Outdoors
With so many new owners coming into the market, does the marketing message shift from explaining why somebody should buy a suppressor to explaining which suppressor they should buy? With this explosion in sales, how is that changing your approach to marketing?
Mike Aland
That’s a fantastic question. I think we can parse it out even a little bit more.
A decade ago, I went to an NRA show. I started at SilencerCo in 2012. The first month I worked there, I went to the NRA show, and I didn’t know anything about our product. I didn’t come from the gun industry. I was always into guns—100%. I was actually a customer of SilencerCo before I worked there—but I wasn’t familiar with the product line quite yet.
So I just listened. I sat next to the sales guys and listened to what consumers were asking.
Back then it was, “These aren’t legal. You can’t sell those. You guys are felons.”
There became this instant opportunity to educate people, which we talked about the other day. One of the first campaigns was, “Yes, silencers are legal.” That was a major hurdle to overcome.
There was a lot of bad PR around silencers: These are tools of assassins and all that sort of thing. So there was a massive effort on SilencerCo’s part to educate people: Yes, you can own them.
Concurrently, we were working with ASA and helping found ASA as a founding member. Let’s get some more states. Let’s get hunting rights. Let’s open up all these opportunities.
Fast-forward to today. I think there are a lot of new facets to who we target, and some of them strategically I won’t talk about.
But you look at what the benefits are, and that question gets answered differently depending on your age and what demographic you’re in. Then there are feature sets, and that’s what I talked about earlier between a do-all can versus a scalpel.
As we see the latest and greatest caliber—I think what we did yesterday with PRS is fun because it seems like every year they’re all shooting a different caliber. There’s this new round that has a better ballistic coefficient (BC) that I can shoot farther and straighter. We have products that can address that.
So we teach people about that. My approach to marketing is that there’s not a magic key that unlocks it all. We have to get really specialized in who we talk to, where we’re talking to them, and how we talk to them.
QA Outdoors
I don’t know exactly when it rolled out, but I remember seeing the “It Matters Where It’s Made” campaign around the NRA show. That speaks to the fact that you do nearly everything in-house and control the process, which allows you to service discontinued products, go to market faster, scale faster, and deal with warranty repairs very quickly.
How do you see that campaign extending in light of the dramatic changes in the market since then?
Mike Aland
If I could have paid you $100 to ask me that question, I would have, because we’ve actually just changed the campaign.
It’s now, “It Really Matters Where It’s Made.”
Being in a position as a named plaintiff in the lawsuit opens up some pretty unique opportunities, not only for us but the other named plaintiffs, and it does further that point.
As we look at the 200 or 300 new competitors we acquired this year, as things settle out and we start to understand the landscape of what this injunction and future lawsuits will bring, we’re going to see a lot more competitors.
That drives the point home even more. When someone buys a silencer, in 18 years are they going to answer the phone and fix your problem?
That’s an honest and important question.
QA Outdoors
That was a point brought up at the NRA Show by the head of another suppressor company. He said we saw this with the AR boom: companies came in, and five years later they were gone. The companies that had been in the game for a long time remained.
That’s certainly true for SilencerCo. You have a structure that allows you to provide a product that, separate from the quality and features of the product itself, is backed by the assurance that if the customer has a problem, it will get addressed.
Do you buy from somebody who just entered the market with flashy marketing and a bright, shiny object? Or do you have more confidence in a company that has weathered the storms and has a reputation for taking care of its distributors, dealers, and customers—and can build more product when demand increases?
Mike Aland
I love that.
When we met to decide whether we were going to launch a new product this year, that was a very thoughtful and detailed discussion.
QA Outdoors
Was that hard for you as a marketing guy who always wants to talk about something new?
Mike Aland
One hundred percent.
But I signed up for it. I knew by signing up for this plan that I was going to have one of the more difficult tasks I’ve ever had as a marketer.
It’s one thing not to launch a new product in a calendar year. It’s a whole other thing to suddenly get 300 new competitors at the same time who have the latest, greatest, and shiniest products.
But I looked at it and thought: We have something that very few companies have in this space. We’ve referred to it in the past as the complete package.
First, is the product good? Does it sound good? Does it perform the way it’s expected? Does it surprise you with how well it performs? We feel like we do that, top to bottom, in our product line.
Do we have an amazing warranty with fast turnaround times? Yes, we do. There are a handful of other things.
As you start constructing this complete package of what makes SilencerCo SilencerCo, it’s taken years to create the inertia to become trusted.
You gain trust not only in the good times, but probably more so in the bad times and through problems. Take the recall I mentioned. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but we owed it to our customers to make sure we did right by them and issued a recall.
The outpouring of support for owning a mistake that we made was amazing. We had one social media post about it. That was our official announcement, and you’re reading hundreds of comments saying, “This is how you do business. This is fantastic.”
You never want a recall, but it was a nice indicator that we owned it. We made a mistake. We owned it, and people responded extremely positively to it. They were even calling out competitors and tagging them in our posts, saying, “This is how you should do business,” which we didn’t solicit.
It was one of those things where you realize that having that complete package helps weather the storm of something negative.
QA Outdoors
Let me ask you one final question because we’re running out of time.
There are all these components: the history of the company, the experience, and the foundational work of creating systems that allowed you to handle a complicated manufacturing process and scale it.
Then you have to address challenges such as demand skyrocketing. You need people working around the clock. You need everyone doing their part, whether it’s finishing, machining, QC, packaging, or shipping. Everybody has to be on board and moving in the same direction.
Speak to the culture of SilencerCo and the people and employees who make that happen. What creates that bond internally, and ultimately, how does it affect the company’s relationship with its customers, from distributors and dealers to the end user?
Mike Aland
It’s an interesting thing working on the culture of a company that has seen ups and downs and changes in leadership. Those are all super challenging.
We try to cultivate a culture where we want to succeed, and we try to give each employee, no matter what their role, the ability to succeed.
I won’t give you the exact numbers, but I’ll give you the frame of reference. The last boom that we saw comparable to the current one was before HPA. Up to a certain point toward the end of last year, the numbers were almost comparable.
We did it this time with half the employees.
That’s not to say we don’t value and love our employees, but we’ve been able to streamline and become so efficient that we can scale without adding a bunch of people whom you might have to lay off later. That’s something that weighs on us.
It’s really easy on a spreadsheet to go, “Yeah, I see this coming. Let’s add a bunch of employees, and when it levels out or goes down, we’re just going to fire them.”
We don’t operate like that.
We want to cultivate someone from Operator One through the ranks. We want to grow people into senior leadership positions. You don’t do that by adding a bunch of people and firing them depending on market conditions.
You’re smart with how you scale, knowing that this might not last forever.
When you have that environment where people feel secure in their roles, they do a fantastic job for you, and you reward them. You get to a point where those little touches of quality and that pride in where you work always translate into the final product.
The desire for people to come in on weekends and work an extra shift—they don’t do it because they get time and a half. They do it because they see the mission of the brand and they want us to succeed because they know they personally succeed in that scenario.
You start with a very thrown-around word—“culture”—but if you cultivate the proper culture, it’s evident in the product that comes out.
And not just the physical product, but the warranty, the marketing, and everything else. There’s a passion there that you can’t pay for.
It’s not a transaction. It’s earned, and it’s learned.
QA Outdoors
Thanks so much for your time, Mike.
