About This Episode
In today’s episode of Tactical Business, host Wade Skalsky sits down with Mark Barham from Galco Holsters. Mike shares his journey from working various jobs to finding his passion in the firearms industry. Starting in customer service at a firearms importer, he later joined Galco Gunleather, where he worked his way up to Media & PR Manager over 21 years. He discusses the evolution of holster materials, market trends, and Galco’s commitment to American-made craftsmanship. Tune in for insights into the industry and concealed carry culture!
Insights In This Episode
- Exposure at industry events (like SHOT Show) helped Mike advance in his career.
- Firearm sales correlate with political climates and societal stability, affecting business strategies.
- Gun laws and environmental regulations shape where and how companies operate.
- Rapid expansion can strain adaptability, so businesses must balance scaling with flexibility.
Today’s Guest
Mike Barham | Galco
Galco International, LTD, founded in 1969 by Richard N. Gallagher as The Famous Jackass Leather Company, is a premier manufacturer of high-quality holsters and leather goods. Renamed in 1980 and relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, in 1983, Galco gained fame with its Jackass shoulder system, featured in Miami Vice. Today, Galco supplies law enforcement, military, and armed citizens with top-tier holsters, maintaining its reputation for excellence and innovation.
Featured on the Show
About Tactical Business
Tactical Business is the weekly business show for the firearms industry. The podcast features in-depth interviews with the entrepreneurs, professionals and technologists who are enabling the next generation of firearms businesses to innovate and grow.
Episode Transcript
Wade: Welcome to the Tactical Business Show. I’m your host, Virginia Beach based firearms entrepreneur and copywriter Wade Skalsky. Each episode will be exploring what it takes to thrive as a business owner in the firearms industry. We’ll speak with successful firearms industry entrepreneurs about their experiences building their companies, leaders and legislators who are shaping the industry, and tech executives whose innovations will reshape the future of the firearms industry. Let’s get after it. Welcome to the Tactical Business Podcast. I am your host, Wade Skalsky, and today I’m talking with Mike Barham from Galco Holsters. Mike, how are you doing today?
Mike: I’m doing great. I’m glad to be here. Wade. Great.
Wade: I’m happy to have you. I’m excited to chat. I always can geek out about holsters all day long. So I’m excited to talk to you today. And before we get going on what Galco is doing now, what was your journey to get to where you are now? I’m pretty sure you didn’t just pop out of high school and say, I’m going to start a holster company.
Mike: Oh no, nothing quite like that. So it’s a little bit of a long story, but I had gotten out of the Army and drifted around to a couple of kind of dead end jobs. Over the years, I had worked security and I’d been an optician for a while and things like that. And then nine over 11 happened, and I kind of decided that rather than spinning my wheels, doing these kind of dead end jobs that I wanted to do something like, or maybe I even loved. And I had grown up around guns and shooting and had been a competitive shooter since I was like 16 years old. It was part of the reason I joined the Army. So after nine over 11, I just decided I needed to find something in the gun industry and a job was available. I was living in Connecticut at the time and a job was available at a firearms importer. Traditions. Performance. Firearms. Great little company. They’re still in business and I just kind of knocked on the door. Walked in. Got hired on as a customer service agent.
Mike: Did that for only about a year. And that was really my first exposure. And I got to go to shot show and things like that, you know, very, very cool for a fairly young guy as I was at the time. And in 2003, my wife and I decided to move to Arizona. She had a job lined up and I didn’t really have anything but got out to Arizona and I saw that Calico Gun Leather was hiring. This was, of course, back in the day that you physically opened a newspaper and looked at the want ads. So I went and knocked on the door at calico, went through 2 or 3 interviews, one of which was probably the hardest interview of my life before or since, and got hired on again as a customer service agent. This was back in 2003, and since then I’ve just kind of steadily worked my way up through the ranks at calico over the last 21 years, and now I am the media and PR manager. I am delighted to still be with Galco. It’s a great company.
Wade: What I love about that story is that you made those opportunities yourself, right? You basically just went and knocked on the door and said, hey, what’s up? What’s going on? I think that is a lost art, especially in today’s society, of physically going somewhere, knocking on the door without an invitation and just saying, hey, what’s happening? And I think that’s an amazing part of your story.
Mike: Thank you. Yeah, and you’re right, that is a bit of a lost art. Things become more atomized and communication becomes more and more electronic and less and less face to face. I think we’ll see probably more of that rather than less. And I think we’ve kind of lost something in that regard.
Wade: Yeah, well, it’s definitely an arrow in the quiver that you can use. I mean, interpersonal communication between two people in person. Still, people are always going to have to do that, but you have to force yourself to get good at it now if you’re not already good at it. So. Well, amazing. So I’m assuming that Gallico has grown from when you arrived 20 years ago or so to now. Has that growth been sort of linear? Has there been parts where it has sort of been plateaued and then jumped? How would you describe the growth process of the company since you’ve been there.
Mike: It’s definitely been a series of plateaus, no question about that. When I came on, it was early on in the global war on terror. The George Bush presidency, and things were great. Then when the country’s under a little bit of stress, as it was shortly after nine over 11 and those years leading up to the Iraq war and things like that. You know, at that time, growth for us was pretty linear, and it plateaued a little bit. And then the world’s greatest gun salesman was elected, Barack Obama. And that was beyond linear growth for us. That was practically straight up growth for us. And during those years, we actually expanded our manufacturing footprint three different times, and we expanded our campus in Phoenix twice as well. And we ended up even building a whole fulfillment center right there on the campus where we have inventory and our shipping department and things like that. So it definitely hasn’t been completely linear as the rest of the industry has experienced. You know, we had Trump slump number one where things definitely leveled off. They didn’t really decline for us or anything. They just kind of leveled off from where they were. So things were steady there. We got a little bump during the Biden administration and that was nice. But again, things didn’t really reach the level that they did during the Obama years. And then now we’re sort of preparing for Trump slump number two, which while politically, of course, we’re very, very glad to have a Republican administration back in office, you know, things if history is any guide, we do need to be a little more cautious. Yeah, that’s.
Wade: Interesting about how in the firearms industry, politics and political changes is is sort of it’s an additional risk on top of normal business risk. Right. So you normally have market risk with the political risk is pretty big for the gun industry in that way. There’s a lot of psychology that’s involved, a lot of if people feel safer that drive sales. Has that been your experience?
Mike: Oh, absolutely. You know, when people feel safer, they buy fewer guns. When people feel a little unsure about the direction of society or the direction of the country. Gun sales increase. And of course, as a holster company, when people buy guns, they need holsters. And so, you know, we track right along with that. And that’s definitely been our experience is when people feel secure. Sales tend to level off when people feel insecure. Sales rise.
Wade: Now I want to talk a little bit about your holsters. And you guys do sell Kydex holsters.
Mike: Oh, we sell a ton of kydex holsters. About 35% of our sales are.
Wade: Did you start out leather and then move into Kydex or I’m assuming so because 21 years ago it was more leather than Kydex, I think.
Mike: Yeah, the company was actually founded in 1969, 69in Chicago by a gentleman named Richard Gallagher, who was our founder and is still the president of the company, and he remains very active in the company. So he founded the company in Chicago in 1969. And of course, back then there wasn’t kydex in holsters or things like that. So everything he did was in leather. And then in the middle 80s, he moved the company out to the Phoenix area where we remain. We’re on the north side of Phoenix, and that’s where all our manufacturing is done. But in in the middle 90s, we experimented quite a lot with Kydex as a holster material, putting it parallel to our leather holsters. And we learned pretty quickly in about 2 or 3 years. At that time, you could hardly give away a kydex holster. So that line was discontinued. And of course, 8 to 10 years later, Kydex kind of came roaring into the holster industry in a very, very big way. And so we resurrected our Kydex and expanded that line to where it is today, where we have kydex inside the waistband holsters, Kydex outside the waistband holsters. We have hybrid holsters that use kydex and leather. We have kydex and nylon holsters. We even have a kydex shoulder holster. And shoulder holsters have always been sort of our flagship product, but we’ve even incorporated Kydex there. So like I said, about 30 to 35% of our current products or current sales are kydex holsters, with the balance being leather and a little bit of nylon.
Wade: And I always find that the holster market is interesting because there’s a many different ways that you can position yourself in the marketplace for holsters, right? How would you say that? You guys try to position yourself because there are now especially with although this the tariff situation may impact you guys in a positive way. Absolutely. But let’s say Pre-tariff, how did you guys position yourselves to sort of stand out in this really flooded marketplace in two ways.
Mike: We certainly consider ourselves the premier American made holster manufacturer. Now, we’re not a custom shop or anything like that. We do offer some custom services, but primarily we are a large scale manufacturer of holsters, and being American made is a little bit unique. Most of our competition is either overseas or has moved its production overseas to Mexico or parts of Asia, things like that. So there’s that. And we also positioned ourselves as makers, mostly of concealed carry holsters with a sort of sideline of outdoor holsters. But our bread and butter, really 90, 95% of our sales is in the concealed carry marketplace. We don’t do duty gear, we don’t really do tactical type gear or anything like that. Our concentration is pretty strictly on concealed carry with a little side of the outdoors, and this has been great for us. When we decided to concentrate on concealed carry, it was really right before the shale issue or constitutional carry dominoes started to fall across the country. So we were really able to capitalize on that, and we were uniquely well positioned to do that with our strong emphasis on concealed carry holsters.
Wade: Well, and it’s interesting because, you know, one thing about concealed carry that’s so important is comfort and people, they get very excitable about concealed carry until they realize concealed carry every day means EDC means every day, right. And so if you don’t like, you can spend $1 million on your gun and have the best gun and shoot the best in the world. But if it’s at home on your nightstand because you can’t, you’re like, I’m not going to take my gun today because it’s just not comfortable. It doesn’t do you any good. So leather from a comfort perspective does have some advantages over kydex. Is that what you guys find? Why people choose leather over kydex is the comfort.
Mike: Mainly it’s a combination of things. Comfort is a lot of it. Certainly having a piece of leather that has conformed to your body over a couple of months, let’s say, is often quite a bit more comfortable than having a piece of hard plastic pressed up against your body. And there are ways to get around that with kydex holsters. But many people do find leather holsters much more comfortable for concealed carry, so that is part of it. Another part of it, though, is, you know, the gun community is kind of a lot of very traditional people. And, you know, we’ve seen this pretty recently with the resurgence of, say, lever action rifles and what we call the revolver renaissance. So there is a strong market there as well for people who like steel guns, and they like to carry them in leather holsters. You know, these very traditional materials. And I think there are a lot more people like that out there than you might be led to believe if your exposure is only to Gun culture 2.0 by watching YouTube videos, rumble videos, things like that. So there is still a very, very strong market out there for holsters made from traditional materials, primarily leather.
Wade: Well, and I think two is is the one thing about concealed carry versus your more tactical gear is that tactical considerations are like a top down sort of flow. Right. So the military, you know, the special forces community, they have a way that they do it that will trickle down to sort of the gun influencers, which then will trickle down to the public, and then that kind of informs their decision. Whereas everyday carry just normal human beings, that’s more of a bottom up, right? Because that’s based on comfort. Where do they come from? This person’s not coming from a Special Forces background. So I think that that is exactly right with an everyday carry is that there’s opportunity there for that market, however, that you want to position yourself in it. Is that a fair assessment, do you think?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you get a lot of that, as you mentioned, that top down influence. And it definitely creeps into concealed carry. And that’s it’s not a bad thing. You know the been there done that kind of guys. You know we should listen to them. But that doesn’t mean that you need to carry a full size, optically sighted 18 shot pistol with a weapon mounted light in an appendix holster with a sidecar every day of your life that doesn’t fit with a lot of people’s general lifestyle. And again, it is very heavily influenced by very high speed guys, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But sometimes a regular person is going to be better off with a Glock 43 X or even a small frame revolver or something like that. And so we try to capture all of that market. Do we make Kydex appendix carry holsters for that pistol I just mentioned? Yeah, sure we do. But do we also make leather holsters for the person who wants to carry a j-frame revolver? Absolutely. We do those. Or the guys who want to carry 1911 or anything like that. So we do try to service that wide, wide market. And that helps us certainly within our dealer network, that somebody can go into a gun shop, buy something off the shelf that’s going to be a high performance holster, but that they can they can purchase off the shelf for a reasonable price.
Wade: And I think that would make you also more accessible to the women’s market as well. Right. Because you have women who will come in with smaller caliber guns. You have women who might be more comfortable with a revolver like a smaller revolver, even though I don’t know why that is. But that seems to be. We talked to people in the ladies communities, and sometimes they like to go to revolvers, which I don’t understand, but I’m not a woman, so I don’t get it. But the point that I’m trying to make is that you can meet any need that comes to you because you’re not bound by, oh, we have to be in the tactical space.
Mike: Correct. And like I said, we do grab some of that, but we want to be able to provide holsters for anyone in the gun community, anyone in the Second Amendment community who wants to carry a firearm. And we are 100% advocates for carrying your gun. Going back to something that you mentioned a little earlier, the gun on your nightstand or in your gun safe. When you’re out there at the gas station and you get attacked, well, that doesn’t do you any good, but it might be that small frame Glock that saves your life.
Wade: So when I started a concealed carry, I started with a Glock 17. Because I’m a large person. I was like, I’ll just carry a Glock 17 appendix carry. No, that didn’t work out for me. So I went through that process and that’s a learning process. Let’s shift gears a little bit now to the supply side of things, because leather is a different material than say, Kydex. Have you guys experienced any sourcing issues with that or is that not really a problem on the other side of things?
Mike: I wouldn’t characterize it as a problem, but here’s the way it works for us. We buy our hides from two tanneries that are left in the United States that do the kind of vegetable tanning that we need. Unfortunately, over the course of the last several decades, the number of tanneries that do this has been steadily reduced, largely because of EPA oriented regulations, environmental regulations. Now, the vegetable tanning that we use for the vast majority of our products is not environmentally harmful or anything like that. Unlike chrome tanning, which uses heavy metals to essentially cure the leather. But anyway, because of these environmental regulations, which are very, very onerous, um, most of the tanneries in the United States have been driven out of business or had to move overseas. So we have to compete for the top 2% of available steer hide production from these two tanneries left in the United States. And that can be a challenge. We are competing with everybody from high end upholstery manufacturers to high end shoe manufacturers to high end ladies, handbag manufacturers for that top 2% of leather. And that’s what we need to get to construct the premium steer hide holsters that comprise the majority of our leather product line. And that can be difficult competing for that top 2% of leather. And it can be expensive. And that sometimes has to be reflected in our prices. However, that does not dissuade us from using these two American tanneries. We do not import our leather. We buy it all domestically.
Wade: This episode is brought to you by TacticalPay.com. Every few years, it seems large banks and national credit card processors suddenly decide that they no longer want to process payments for firearms and firearms related businesses, and so they drop these businesses with almost no notice. Freezing tens of thousands of dollars in payments for months on end. If you want to ensure your partner with a payments provider that is dedicated to supporting the firearms industry, or you just want to find out if you could be paying less for your ACH, debit and credit card processing, visit TacticalPay.com. Again, that’s TacticalPay.com. I think in the coming at least for the next four years, that might put you in a very good position compared to your competitors, basically with what’s coming on with these tariffs. So if the material side of things from other countries starts to see those, those tariffs that will actually help you guys, I would think.
Mike: Yes, it certainly should. We have always sourced domestically. We always will to the best of our ability. Until those two tanneries are gone, we will source our our hides domestically. And luckily we have experience with that. And we have a lot of history with these two tanneries and a lot of goodwill with them. Have you ever.
Wade: Thought about doing another type of leather like bison leather or anything like that? The only reason that’s on my mind is because I have a connection. Like I’m buying some stuff from a bison producer right now, and I’m like, I wonder if we could do that. That’d be kind of cool.
Mike: We have experimented with practically every type of leather you could imagine, including bison, but we’ve used cowhide. We’ve used steer. We. We currently use premium steer. Hide. We use something called center cut, steer, hide, which you can think of as sort of a, a suede on steroids. And we’ve used quite a lot of horse hide as well, which is an excellent material for creating holsters, but it’s a little bit hard to work with, and it’s a little bit harder to get than even that 2% of premium steer hide I talked about. But as far as bison and things like that, it’s a little bit more exotic. It’s a little bit harder to source in the quantities that we need. And just to break off a little bit, and I want to tell you a little bit about the quantities that we actually use. So if you took all the hides that Galco uses to make holsters in a single year, if you took the cows that we need to get those hides from and line them up from stem to stern, you would have a line of cows that stretched about 41 miles. That’s the amount of leather that we use every year to make holsters, sourcing that amount of pretty much anything else but steer hide is next to impossible.
Wade: Well, yeah, you’d run through all the bison in the country after a few years, right?
Mike: Right. The Great Plains would look like they did in the late 1800s, right?
Wade: Everybody. Everybody would be mad at you.
Mike: Exactly, exactly. And, you know, that’s one of the great things about using steer Hide is that, you know, these animals are being used for other things anyway. So we take the hides, but the meat is used, the bones are used, you know, all that is used. The internal organs are used. So that’s a very nice part of using steer hide.
Wade: So you’ve got this next four years that are coming up right now. The environment is going to be different. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. Regulations are going to come down. Hopefully that’ll make the sourcing easier. Are you going to alter your plans for the next four years do you think? Like where do you see you guys going as let’s say the next year or two, three years? Do you know? Are you going to kind of keep doing what you’re doing, or do you have any expansion plans or kind of going to wait and see attitude. What’s your guys’s plan for the next couple of years?
Mike: Well, for the next year, it’s definitely going to be more wait and see. It’s very, very hard to predict, even with four years of history with the Trump administration, the new version, Trump 2.0, definitely seems a lot more fast moving, a lot more aggressive, which I think is in general a good thing. But Galco has always been a bit of a cautious company, and that has served us well over the years. So I think at least for the next year, it will definitely be a wait and see attitude. And a lot of what we do will depend on how sales go. You know, like I said, everybody is anticipating the Trump slump 2.0. We haven’t seen it yet. Sales are still excellent, but that is always on the back of everybody’s mind. The good thing is that Galco is a sort of small to medium sized company in the in the broad scheme of things, and that does give us the ability to remain pretty nimble in the marketplace, and we can turn things pretty quickly. We can ramp up production quickly, we can reduce production pretty quickly. So we’re able to be pretty reactive in the marketplace just because of the, again, small to medium size of the company.
Wade: Have you guys found that that fact that your small and medium size has been an advantage on the innovation side, because you don’t have to go through all the bureaucratic red tape of a giant corporation, right? Like if you’re still more small to medium, you’re able to be more nimble and innovative. On on the tech side, have you seen that or experienced that?
Mike: Yes, absolutely. You know, there aren’t any really huge holster companies out there. You know, Galco remains the largest leather holster manufacturer in the United States, if not the world. And so, you know what? What being nimble means in this segment of the market. It does require you to be a bit reactive in terms of things like when new guns come onto the market, but there are also things you need to be reactive to and nimble about in terms of trends in, say, concealed carry. You know, we weren’t caught flat footed by the the move to appendix carry holsters, for example. You know we were well aware of that. Saw it coming and we were able to move into that space pretty quickly. And yeah, part of that, because we’re a relatively small company, certainly on the administrative and R&D side, we’re quite a small company. It’s still essentially a family owned company in that regard. Now, on the manufacturing side, it’s a little bit different. But we do have the ability to change gears pretty quickly. And a lot of that is because of the size of the company relative to other businesses.
Wade: The manufacturing side of things that’s constant, that I’ve seen from the people that I’ve interviewed is that they really are nimble, both from a production capability but also from shifting to, okay, we’re going to explore this, you know, going from appendix to strong side whatever. Um, and I think that’s a competitive advantage that I think people sometimes get caught up. Oh, we have to grow. We have to grow. We have to grow. There’s always a price to that.
Mike: And Galco is has experienced periods of very, very rapid growth. And we’ve seen firsthand that when all your resources are going into that growth, you can’t be quite as nimble.
Wade: Another constant that I see is that geography plays a role in a business successes for for whatever reason, it’s a it’s a constant theme. Being in Arizona has conferred any advantages to you guys in terms of on the production side or regulation side. Walk me through that a little bit.
Mike: That’s actually a great question, and I’m not sure anybody’s ever asked me that before. Um, but the answer is absolutely yes. As I mentioned, the company started in Chicago, and even back then in the 70s and early 80s, um, things were going a certain way in Chicago, and it was pretty easy to predict, uh, more gun regulation, less freedom, things like that. That was part of the reason that Mr. Gallagher wanted to move the company to Arizona, which to this day remains a much freer place than than any part of Illinois. So the business and gun regulations definitely have helped us in Arizona. But one thing that’s overlooked a lot, especially when we’re making leather holsters, is that a dry and arid climate enables the holsters to dry faster than they would in a humid climate. And because we have this dry climate, we can produce oiled leather holsters considerably faster than somebody can in a humid environment. So literally, the physical climate of Arizona helps us in addition to the business and legal climates.
Wade: The only reason I know to ask that question is I’ve interviewed so many people in there and just organically over time, everyone would always have some element of geographically where they were that helped them, that gave them some kind of competitive advantage. Maybe it’s oh, well, you know, we live in this area and we have to sell people this type of guns and we learn that the hard way or whatever. But that is one big thing for businesses I think that people neglect to look at is just like the geography plays a very important role in the business itself. Now, from a competitive environment, I’m sure you’ve seen competitors come and go, but what changes have you seen in the marketplace, say, in the last five, ten years compared to when you first got there from a competitive standpoint? Market share?
Mike: I’m going to go back a little bit farther than that, if you don’t mind. But in the 80s, 90s into the 2000, what you mostly saw were relatively large holster manufacturers Safariland, Bianchi, Galco, Mitch Rose, and even to a degree back then. But what you’ve seen since, certainly in the last ten years, is a splintering where you have a lot of small companies and many of them producing absolutely excellent holsters. And I don’t want to take a lot away from those smaller companies because many of them do produce excellent products. But that was, for example, one of the things that led Galco to move out of the Cowboy Action shooting Arena. Ten, 12, maybe 15 years ago. That market became dominated by smaller shops, not necessarily one man shops, but smaller shops of, say, 5 to 10 employees. And they were able to produce and stay profitable by making a relatively small, by galco standards, number of holsters, they were able to stay in business doing that. And I think you’re seeing something similar happen in certainly in the concealed carry market that Galco emphasizes. There are a tremendous number of smaller shops with relatively small capacity out there vying for market share, and it just hasn’t been like that before. And part of that is because Kydex is such an easy material to work with. You know, pretty much anybody with a relatively small set of equipment can bend kydex and mold kydex, and that has certainly been a bit of a challenge for us. You know, it’s not like versus Bianchi, like it was in the 1980s. You know, now it’s with the disappearance on a large scale of a lot of the companies like Bianchi, it’s galco versus all these little guys. And again, I don’t want to take away from a lot of those companies. They do make excellent products. But that has definitely been a challenge for us in terms of sales and marketing.
Wade: And I wonder, though, if leather is sort of a competitive edge for you, for the production, there’s a disincentive to go into leather because of the sourcing issue that you talked about right then. And that’s going to affect quality because, you know, you have a built in relationship already, so people aren’t going to be able it’s going to be harder for people to get the market share of that good material that you already kind of have. But then also on the production side too, like leather, is very difficult to work with. Like anyone that’s ever gone to summer camp and they make a belt like, you know, they know like it’s tough. It’s not that easy.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, one of my jobs actually is or one of the hats I wear at Galco is I coordinate things like writer tours of our facility for outdoor writers, bloggers, people like that, videographers. And every single time I walk somebody through our factory, they are astounded at the number of steps we take to produce a leather holster. It could be anywhere from 35 to 80 different steps to produce a premium leather holster. And, you know, just watching people’s eyes kind of go wide when they see the factory floor. And they see here we have in our raw material storage a hide. And here are all the steps it has to go through to come out at quality Assurance and have a single premium leather holster and all the many, many steps and the many, many hands that holster passes through before it gets packaged. So yeah, there is a lot that goes into making a leather holster. And you’re right, that may dissuade a lot of people versus the relatively simple task of bending a piece of kydex around a gun. Well, and.
Wade: I think from a production side of things, it’s much easier to systematize on the kydex side than it is on the holster side for quality control. Right? So because there’s just more of a human element, I would think on the leather side of things than there is on the contact side of things.
Mike: We have pretty standardized procedures, but leather being a natural material, there are always going to be variations. There are variations in color, there are variations in thickness, there are variations in porosity. So all these things have to be accounted for during that manufacturing process. And while I’m not on the production side, I would venture to say that probably more leather holsters as a percentage fail quality inspection versus kydex holsters, which are pretty cut and dried.
Wade: Yeah. Well, no, but that’s my point. Is that what you take for granted, for quality control and systemization, for the leather side of things, getting that process to that point, I think would be much more difficult than it would be for Kydex because like you said, there’s so many more factors. And when you start to go volume, like if you’re a small shop and you’re going to make everything by hand and you know you’re doing it, then okay, great. But if you’re going to go volume, people don’t understand the challenges of manufacturing, of what that means to to have every holster kind of come out the same or with an acceptable variance. And I think that’s another advantage you guys have, is that you’ve done the work to establish that for your leather holsters at volume. So I think that’s a great advantage. You have.
Mike: Agreed. I’ll point out we’ve been in business for 55 years, and we are still refining and perfecting that process. It is an ongoing lifetime thing.
Wade: This is like a real geeky question that no one else but me is going to care about. But has there been a change in the leather itself, the steer leather that you get now? Is it the same as the steer leather you got 20 years ago? Or as far as ranching changed in some way that you get a different not necessarily quality, but it’s just different somehow. Like, does the leather change from over every five years, or is the process pretty much the same.
Mike: Because we purchase only the top 2% of available steer hide in the country? I would say it’s been very, very consistent over the last several decades. Again, I’m not on the production side, but I am aware of what goes on in our raw materials storage facility And I personally can’t say that we’ve seen it. Certainly not a dip in quality from the tanneries we purchased from. But again, and I know I’m kind of harping on this, but we do compete for the very top of the pyramid in terms of leather.
Wade: No, the only reason I ask is because farming and ranching has changed so much, whereas the wheat you get today is not the same wheat you got 20 years ago. I don’t know if that was the same thing for ranching or not, but stuff like that interests me. It may interests no one else listening, but for me, because that that creates a certain set of challenges when you’re depending upon a raw material for production. And so that’s great that you have that consistency of material that is also an advantage as well.
Mike: It is. And we’re very grateful, obviously, to have the good relationships that we do with with those tanneries.
Wade: Well, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. I guess my question I would ask is if someone was listening right now and they wanted to get into, let’s say, manufacturing of something, not necessarily holsters, but anything manufacturing in the firearms industry. Is there something that comes to mind of 1 or 2 things that you can tell them that might help compress some time frames for them, because it is kind of a complicated vertical? Yes.
Mike: Do your research, especially in the legal realm, before you start spending money. It is sort of shocking how much effort and money we have to put toward regulations and legal things. I am also the person who is very, very lucky to write and edit our technical manuals, and there is so much that goes into writing a technical manual for a holster that isn’t technical. It is safety, it is liability, it’s legality. All those things have to go into what should be a very simple document, but it’s not. It’s it’s made very complex by all these outside sources and influences that we have to take into account. And so I’d say for somebody getting started, especially in the firearms space, do that research before you commit, before you start spending money.
Wade: I think that’s really good advice. I mean, I write for the firearms industry and I’m an attorney. And so that’s sort of an edge that I have because people don’t understand. They don’t understand how easy it is to trip across liability in anything you put out there as a firearms company. And even if you’re like firearms adjacent, like a holster company, right. Like you still have these challenges that you have to be very aware of. So I think that’s great advice. I’ve loved having you on the show today. How do people find you? Obviously, give me the website, give me the socials. If people have questions, how do they reach you guys?
Mike: Yeah, it’s pretty much galco holsters all across social media and our website is also Galco Holsters comm. We try to keep it simple for everybody.
Wade: And I’m assuming there’s a contact form on the website somewhere if people want to get Ahold of you.
Mike: Yes, absolutely. They can contact us through the website or give our customer service guys a shout. They’re awesome guys. They’re all shooters, they’re all gun carriers. And they can be reached at customer service. Again, Gaucho holsters.com. Amazing.
Wade: Well, look, I’d love to have you on the show again in six months to a year. And then maybe we can talk about after that. Wait and see period has happened. What’s happening with the Trump 2.0. Because I think they’re going to have a totally different experience with Trump. I think he’s on a mission now, and he should be like two weeks into his retirement right now.
Mike: Yeah, exactly so yeah, I think things are going to shake out differently than probably anybody is even predicting right now. So yeah, I’d love to come back in six or so months. That would be outstanding.
Wade: Well, let’s do it for sure. Until then, Mike, so thankful to have you on the show today. Thank you for.
Mike: Having me, Wade, I appreciate it.
Wade: You’ve been listening to the Tactical Business Show by TacticalPay.com. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the firearms industry.