It has been a while since we have posted anything to the blog, but now seems like a good time for an update.
Spring is right around the corner, and with the summer shooting season approaching, we really want to provide more grips to those who have been asking.
When we got the call for the opportunity to work with Lipsey’s and provide a grip for the Lipsey’s Exclusive Ultimate Carry J-Frame, we were shocked and humbled. Our first large deal, and it is on something called the “Ultimate Carry.” Just amazing.
With our current line of products, things sell out so quickly that it has been difficult to keep things in stock.
To make matters worse, as we expand our line of designs and model offerings, the number of different iterations in our catalog grows while our production capacity has stayed static for the last year and a half. What this means for us and our customers is that with every new release the ability to produce product for our previously released grip designs becomes a battle. Previously released designs do not always get the production focus they deserve.
What we have been doing, and how we pivoted.
The original plan was to build a shop. We worked with the power company to get additional power to support more machines. As things played out, I soon realized that the path I was on would take too long. I was going to hit a very near-term bottleneck that would A) frustrate customers, B) frustrate the businesses we work with, and C) limit our potential to be nimble in adding production capacity right now.
We pivoted.
Instead of building a shop space, a very fortuitous opportunity came up through an available commercial lease approximately five minutes from our house.
We have spent the last month and a half getting all this in motion. It has involved driving around the countryside to purchase electrical equipment, building out purpose-built rooms for printing, and in general a lot of work.
All this while we are still operating Hamre Forge, producing grips, and shipping orders to our much-loved customers.
I believe we are two weeks at the minimum and four weeks at the maximum from being fully moved over to the new facility.
With this move will come the expanded capacity we have been trying to work up to for quite a while now.
The crazy thing I will say about all this is that we made a major investment with the machinery we have now. When we embarked on our current path, we did it with the thinking that it would take years to outgrow the capacity we were purchasing. We were epically wrong because we outgrew that capacity in a matter of months.
The additional capacity we are onboarding now offers twice the production capacity of what we have today and what we have been operating with over the last year and a half.
In the next week or two we will be releasing two highly sought-after options: Extended Boot Round Butt N-Frame hooks. These are for lightweight round-butt N-Frames like the Night Guard series and the S&W 327 PC. In addition to that, we will be releasing a batch of Spegel Boot J-Frame Low Horn hook pairs.
We will keep these smallish batch releases until we are in the new shop. Then we can figure out a manufacturing and release cadence that will be manageable for us but also better satisfy customer demand.
A few very high-priority items for us to work on are still some Colt offerings and tackling the Ruger SP101 and GP100.
The support from our customers has been absolutely amazing. We have been blessed, and we take all feedback and support seriously. Please do not hesitate to reach out with questions or comments or things you would like to see.
God bless.
Ryan Hamre