An insider looks at archery's future - Hawk Associates owner Rich Walton

Shooting Industry, Oct, 1998 by Carolee Boyles

In the archery industry, a few people are perennials. They're in the trenches all the time, year after year, doing a good job at what they do, and advancing the industry.

Rich Walton, owner of Hawk Associates, has been around the archery industry since the early '70s. He started out as an in-house PR guy, and then turned a devastating moment into an entirely new career that has helped define public relations in the industry for the past decade.

Hawk Associates is a full-service public relations and marketing agency, offering clients everything from news releases to catalogs and advertising placement. Walton handles each client individually, carefully matching the client's needs with a tailored package of services.

Walton started with PSE back when archery was still a small industry.

"I joined them in 1977," he says. "I was the director of marketing and advertising. Then in 1984 I went to work for Barnett. After about two years, there was a big political shuffle and I was fired. It was the first time in my life that I'd ever been fired, and it was like somebody had disemboweled me. I thought that I'd done everything I was supposed to do and the world had treated me so unfairly."

At that point, Walton says, he wanted to get out of the archery industry. He started looking into other businesses.

"Then one morning I woke up and thought, 'This is stupid,'" he says. "'Why reinvent the wheel? I have a master's degree in advertising, I've been in the industry for 10 years. Do I really want to change gears at this stage in my life?"'

Walton decided to start an agency doing for clients exactly what he had done for PSE and Barnett. In 1987 he started Hawk Associates. Within a month he had four clients, and he was off and running.

Besides taking care of his public relations and marketing clients, Walton wears a couple of other hats. He occasionally freelances for several trade magazines. And he has an equity interest in an Internet site that caters to bowhunters.

"It's called Bowhunting Net," he says. "It's now the largest Internet site in the world for bowhunting."

The address of the site is www.bowhunting.net, and it contains everything from new product information to regular sweepstakes where visitors can win archery-related prizes.

Given his time in the industry, and his view of archery from several different perspectives over that time, Walton is able to keep his finger on industry trends. He says one thing he sees coming in equipment development is fewer design changes, and more materials changes.

"I have said for a number of years that the big changes would not come from design, but from materials," he says. "When you look at it, the only recent design change we've had is going from a dual-cam bow to a single-cam bow. That's not an earth-shattering change like going from a longbow to a recurve to a compound. It's a very subtle change."

One fairly big design change that took place a few years ago was the introduction of fiber optics into sights. Walton says in terms of true innovation, though, fiber optics won't go much farther.

"Somebody will come up with something that will advance fiber optics," he says. "They'll be brighter in daylight and the dark, but there's still no electrical attachments, there's no batteries required."

The same thing is true of many other aspects of equipment development, he says. Engineers will continue to refine and improve existing designs, but any industry-shaking changes just aren't on the horizon.

"Companies will keep massaging cams to make them faster and smoother," Walton says. "They're going to make it easier to change configurations. Almost every company has the ability now to change the draw length on the cam, without taking the bow apart."

Look at the way we're using new materials, though, and innovations seem inevitable.

"Eventually, you're going to see a titanium riser," Walton says. "Titanium is still pretty expensive, but it's strong. It's not as light as magnesium, but it's lighter than aluminum."

Walton says he thinks the industry is still interested in getting more speed out of arrows, and that will cause the popularity of carbon arrows to continue to climb.

"I think carbon will replace aluminum," he says. The only reason it hasn't is the price. The arrows are stronger. If you shoot an animal with an aluminum arrow it's gone. You can shoot a carbon arrow two or three times and it's still good. In the next five to six years, aluminum will go the way of wood."

Another development trend he sees is increased use of mechanical broadheads, those whose blades fold back, then open on impact.

"They're getting more and more sophisticated," he says. "They've certainly proven themselves with small game. I don't think people are taking them to Africa; you wouldn't want to shoot an elk with them. But I think that for whitetail deer and smaller game, they work well. Again, there's going to be a materials shift, once they figure out how to do it."

Walton suggests that titanium is one of the new materials of which broadheads will be manufactured.