Daystate’s Tony Belas talks through the challenges of preparing for two of the industry’s biggest shows and launching the company’s most important new product, all within 11 days.
People talk about March madness, but for us at Daystate, and a good few other gun companies, the craziness starts early with the Great British Shooting Show (GBSS) at the UK’s NEC in February, then IWA in Nuremberg, Germany, just a few days later.
Things were a little more manic this year as we decided to launch the Daystate Blackwolf, our most significant new product for quite a while, at the same time.
Of course, we’re not alone in preparing for the European gun show one-two, and plenty of other companies were flat out for the same reason. Many of those outside the business, especially attendees at the consumer-focused GBSS, assume we have armies of people whose only job is to handle shows and exhibitions, and another for new product launches.
Those on the inside know the truth, though; for Daystate and many other gun companies, the people that run the company day to day also take on all the gruelling planning, preparation, and execution of the back-to-back shows.
Last year was even tougher as IWA followed the GBSS less than a week later. This year we had the luxury of an 11-day gap, so to fill in all that extra time, we decided to embark on our most important launch in years.
Any engineering project takes longer than people think. Just working out what kind of rifle you’re going to make and that the market wants is the first hurdle. Ask twenty people, and you’ll get 21 different answers.
Then there’s the actual development itself, followed by testing, pre-production, a run-up batch, more testing, and finally full production. And of course, all these steps need to be done at breakneck speed if you don’t want your new product to be obsolete just as you launch it.
A new rifle can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to develop and take at least three years from start to finish. In the past, of course, it took even longer. Back in the days before SolidWorks and AutoCAD, you could easily double that time—longer still if you ran into snags. And in the days of blueprints and handmade samples, you usually did.
After all this is done, the final marketing strategy is critical. A mistake or information leak at the wrong point can compromise the impact of a new product that many people have worked so hard on.
Timing is also important. It’s no accident that the Great British Shooting Show and IWA are at the beginning of the shooting season. And, to point out the obvious, neither organiser is going to help you out and put back their events just because you need a few more days to perfect your launch plan. Talk about a hard deadline.
Fortunately, the Blackwolf project was originally due to be completed in late summer 2024, but whilst we decided to continue from development straight into production, the decision was made to delay the launch for the two shows. That gave us the luxury of more time to plan and test but increased the potential for news of the new rifle to leak.
This risk went up a notch because we decided to send pre-production rifles, albeit heavily disguised, to the important Extreme Bench Rest (EBR) competition in October 2024, as the development team wanted to test the new platform in action. A great idea from a development point of view, but very scary from a marketing perspective. Just a few words to the wrong person or an inopportune camera snapshot could have compromised the launch or at least watered down its effect.
In my time at Daystate, I’ve seen maybe 30 new rifle launches, and given the number of links in the chain, something usually goes wrong. Either through malicious intent or blissful ignorance, there’s the potential for someone to talk when they shouldn’t or show a photo which, with social media, can go around the world in a matter of minutes.
Just such a thing happened with the Blackwolf. Someone took a photo at EBR and posted it online. Internet forums lit up, but for once, the leak did us a favour. Thanks to the precaution of disguising the rifle, details were limited, and all the tongue-wagging and conjecture simply fuelled early interest in a new Daystate. I’d like to say it was all part of a marketing masterplan, but now you and I know the truth!
The rest of the time, you learn to adapt and try to use these situations to your advantage to tease the market. Other times, you go looking for a rock to hide under.
Small leaks aside, we managed to get to the launch at the Great British Shooting Show pretty unscathed, with a brand-new stand and a brand-new rifle to launch on it. Well-known airgun journalist Mat Manning came along to reveal the rifle, and at 9:15 on the first day, around 75 people crowded in to see what we’d been up to.
This year’s Great British Shooting Show rebounded from the COVID-affected low numbers of the year before, and we were never short of a full crowd on our stand or on the range.
Incredibly, we have 20 staff at the GBSS now. You simply do not want the criticism that “I came on the Daystate stand, and nobody spoke to me.” The show is just too expensive to attend to miss any opportunity to speak to potential future customers. When you consider breaks and all the different activities that must take place, sometimes 20 people is not enough.
At the conclusion of the Great British Shooting Show, all the stock had to be repackaged and returned to the factory where, over the next couple of days, it was checked and prepared for shipment to Germany—something that is a lot more complicated post-Brexit.
So, on Monday, the day after the GBSS, a very tired crew could be found unpacking and repacking guns in a different configuration for a different show. Whereas the GBSS is predominantly focused on UK consumers who shoot mainly 12 ft/lb rifles, IWA is trade-only, and the international trade wants to know about your high-power product lineup.
A set of rifles for a show has a value of about £25,000, so you can’t afford to take two complete but different sets of rifles out of production. Instead, we had our engineers rework and reconfigure the sub-12 ft/lb rifles we took to GBSS into high-power export versions for IWA.
With that little task done, it was off to Germany! It takes a day to get there, a day to get back, a day to set the stand up, and another day to take it down and repack again. Add in the four days of the actual event, and you’re gone a full and very busy week.
If you think Britain is expensive, you need to visit the IWA show. The organisers understand the value of a captive audience. £3.50 for a bottle of water, sir? Certainly. And can I interest sir in a bowl of mush for £8.00? You soon learn to take food and drink in with you.
A trade show is a completely different pace to a retail show. It’s much slower, with a lot of gaps with no one to speak to. Or you get lots of visitors who have no interest or intention of buying your product but who are simply pacing the halls for something to do. But then again, they could be a future customer who may order hundreds of guns. You simply don’t know and have to be polite and open to all of them.
Over the years, the pure trade nature of IWA has changed, and I’d estimate that as much as a third of the attendees are really general public who have managed to get in either from a contact in the trade or simply had just been sold a ticket by the organisers, who are keen to get their attendance numbers up.
As a result, any meeting can result either in an order for hundreds of guns or an attempt to buy one at a discount for a friend.
Having said all that, although show season is undeniably gruelling on all concerned, it can also be invigorating and pull teams together around a single objective. And being proud of your products makes you want to show them off even more.
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