Back in mid January, if and when any firearm arrived at the store, it sold within a day or two. The Presidential election was still being hotly contested, Biden hadn’t been sworn in yet, and we had just passed the Jan 6 shenanigans at the Capital. For most of about 6 weeks or so from mid January through February, our shelves were bare. There were a couple of days that we literally did not have one gun to sell. Kinda sad for a gun store. That’s when one employee (the one on the left in the picture) made a suggestion: “Since we don’t have many (ha!) guns on the shelves, what if we bring in our favorite custom built guns for display? We could share what we did to each gun and why.”
Genius! So I told him, “Great idea. Make it happen.”
100% Custom Rifles
The next day, every employee who was working that day brought in one (or more) of their personal rifles. All of them were customized, meaning none were straight out of the box rifles from a manufacturer. Every one of these rifles had custom upper and lower receivers, hand guards, grips, triggers, stocks, optics, lights, straps, sights, charging handles, safety switches, mag wells…you name it.
The Intent of the Employee Gun Wall
The intent of this exercise was to have some guns on the shelf. Our shelves were literally bare. At least now we’d have something for our customers to see when they came in the door. Well, they certainly enjoyed this display of AR-15 imagination.
The Result of the Employee Gun Wall
Of course, the result was not what we expected at all. Yes, we had some guns on the shelf, but we’re talking about 5 — 10 rifles, not hundreds to fill the shelves. And none of these guns were for sale. And none of these guns looked like anything you see on any shelf, since they were all completely customized.
The result was conversations about accessories that we’d never had before. People started bringing in their own rifles to see how to best accessorize them. Customers started digging deep into why they needed a better grip, charging handle, or trigger, and then they bought those things because they could put their hands on another rifle similar to their model, and see and feel exactly what it would mean to upgrade their setup in the same way.
The Lessons
What’d we learn from all this? Try something new. Anything. Listen to your employees who are face to face with the customers everyday. Empower your employees to try new things. That employee had the idea, and we gave him the authority to make it happen, and he did.
The employee gun wall is a permanent fixture now, and is still generating conversations that would never have happened otherwise.