Archery Innovators GAS Bowstrings

Strings is something that I've always done, something I've been doing for 30 plus years now. I learned at an early age how important the string was. Morning, everybody. It's one of the most underrated pieces that's on a bow. You spend a whole career of doing things and you know what's great, you also know what's not great. I don't have a playbook that I can look up and say, hey guys, this is what you do when you're a bowstring company of this size. We're writing the playbook as we go along. ♪♪ Page, here. Too easy. Oh, there we go. For the ninth time. You got it. There you go. Back on top again. Brayden Gellington. ♪♪ Dynamic duo. Why weren't those the days? I've been shooting since I've been 13 or 14 years old. Then absolutely just fell in love with the sport and been doing it ever since. Actually started building strings many, many years ago right after we started shooting. Funny story, my dad, we were getting ready to head to a national event. He needed his peep flipped. I didn't do a very good job flipping it. I actually cut his string. So we're getting ready to leave the next morning, called around frantically to try to find a string. Found this guy that was about an hour away. He said, I don't have anything in stock, but I can build you one. Just, you know, come on over here and I'll have it done by the time you got here. Well, he was running behind. He actually was building it while we watched him. And my dad said to me, he said, you think you could do that? And I'm like, yeah, I can definitely try. So that was it. Bought some string material, string jig. And like a lot of other people that, you know, build them in their garage or their basement or whatever, we were building strings. We started with three employees. It was shortly after we had to hire another one. And then we hired another. And we kept building and building. And today we're just over 50 employees. The one thing that we've been able to do at a large level is our scalability and our process for how we build strings. When the order comes in, we process that in through our system. And then that'll go out to what we call our build form station. And we have a very customized computer program with over 6,000 specs, dating back to bows in the 1990s, all the way up to the newest bows. And in those specs, it's basically like a recipe for how do you build the string. Where do we set our jigs? How many twists does it get? You know, what's the loop size? Where are the serving locations? All of those things. Anything that you would need to know, speed knock locations, it's all right there. So it starts there. And then it goes to what we would call a layup station. The layup station is where we basically do the initial layout of the string. So we're going to take the strands themselves, the material, we're going to wrap it around the posts. We do that. We have a very unique way that we build that, what we call our TTS system, total tensioning system. From there, it's going to go to a finisher. The finisher does the work that they do. Also some tensioning that goes along there with putting the servings on and everything else. And then finally it'll end up in the QC's hands. The QC department is responsible for making sure that every string passes the length, that all the serving locations are in the right place, that there's no peep rotation, that the tag doesn't move when it goes up to pressure and comes off from pressure. So there's several checklists that go through with all of that. And then everything gets packaged and sent out and to the customer for a nice happy life, making somebody's bow perform better, hopefully. We don't have the $15 an hour employee just spitting strings out like a lot of people think. Our string makers are really invested in what they do. A lot of these guys, their compensation is based on the number of quality strings we build. And everybody's accountable for the work that they do. So a string maker does the layup process or they finish it or whoever QC's it, everybody puts their initials on the string. We send this out to a dealer and all of a sudden, a month later, we get a call that there's a problem. We know exactly who built the string. We know what day it was built on. We have all of the statistics and the data on that. So everybody's accountable for what we do. And that's really important at the scale that we do it at, right? Because there's so many strings that we're building per day, you know? In our peak season, we might be in north of, you know, 300 or 350 sets that we build in a day. We've got quite a few beaver in the river, so I just caught them right, I mean, five minutes down the road. Now it's being used for string silencers. So one of the things that I also feel has done great things for us is our ability to build a team. What list are we on for the day? We're on three today. We've had a lot of large orders today. Big orders. Big orders to retail. I think it's one of the things that makes us great. I really do, is our fact of having the team that works so well together. And our team is like, you know, it's a big family. And that's important to, you know, that's important to me. It's important that we've been able to put that together and make that sort of environment for everybody. Our most recent, you know, hires was hiring Brayden Gallanty. Whew, it's not bad at all. Not bad at all, no. Best arrow out of the three. Doesn't have to do dishes tonight, okay? Okay, close to the center. Close to the center on any of the three. Your best arrow versus my best arrow. Oh, I think you're in trouble. Yeah, it's... Yeah, I think I got you. Yeah, welcome back to the States, huh? I've been here working my butt off shooting my bow all week and you come in, beat me, figures. I love shooting a bow. It was something that I felt, you know, it really empowered me as a person. It gave me a lot of confidence and it really made me happy. And I would never would have imagined 22 years later, I would still be in this industry, the archery world would have given me everything that it has. And he got it. Brayden Gallanty has done it. I met Eric when I was probably 12, 13 years old. He was, you know, the hot pro, winning all the ASAs, winning all the IBOs. One of Brayden's first ever jobs was spinning strings at the old gas bow strings back in the summer of 2004 when he was on college break. We'd build strings morning, noon, and night and just trying to spit them out as fast as possible. Being able to bring somebody like Brayden to our team, it's invaluable. It boosts the entire team around us. I'm excited to be a part of the team now and be able to work on the process to help make the strings better, faster, get them out the door to customers. Gas bow strings, this is destiny. The atmosphere here that we have created for, you know, not necessarily just for our dealers and making sure that people are taken care of, but this is home. I'm here more than I am home. To put it an easy way, I've worked corporate jobs for a long time and this is the best family-oriented job I've had. They let me work with my kids around my schedule to help be family-oriented and be around my kids. Basically everyone I know, grew up, works here. Love it. It's a fun environment to work in. We make it fun. We make, you know, we make our job not just our job, but our, you know, go-to place where we love to be. You better get him, girl. We get along really well, but it's different. It's family and a really good teammate. It's not harping over you or anything. You know, we work well together to get done while we can. How'd we golf last night? I burned it up. You did? Yeah. Off the horn, though. We were the bad news bears of golf. My putting game was on point. I was? Oh, yeah. Heck yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We needed you last night, man. Yeah, that's about the only thing I did good, but. We'll beat the Dutchman to shoot first. Can he get the perfect score? Yes, he can! What a marvelous performance from... You know, becoming a professional archer and being able to make money at this, strings is super important to doing that. This would be his 12th tent in a row before the win. He got it. So you see our strings on the bows of many of the top shooters in the world. They do that because they have confidence in the product. He is the champ. The confidence they have in this product allows them the opportunity to try to go after the bigger money, you know? The $50,000 Vegas purses. You're the Vegas champion. Could be. Your 2024 Vegas champ, Matias Fullerton! And it's because of that, you know, plus the fact that we're present, we're there, we give back to the sport. You know, we support all the tournament organizations. Got it. Clutch. Got it. Arrow. What a shoot off, Will. It makes sense. It's a good partnership. You know, number one, they can always depend on our product. And number two, you know, they know that when they're supporting us, they're supporting a company that is also supporting them via the outlets that they, you know, that they shoot in and people that are also trying to grow the sport of archery. She got it. Oh! You know, we spend a significant amount of time trying to still further the ball, right? I mean, we want to advance the ball. We're excited about it, but we're gonna keep going. Break your servin'? Yeah. That's how we know it's tight, though. You know, we're still growing. You know, we're thankful to be growing. We love working with the dealers. We love, you know, building this overall community that we've, you know, that we've started to build. It's been a lot of fun.