It's a duty and obligation; the president and CEO of Remington is committed to building a great team, serving the industry and remaining ever vigilant - An Interview with Tommy Millner

Shooting Industry, Dec, 2003 by Russ Thurman

As for the future, we need to do a better job of getting young people and women involved in the shooting sports. There are a number of industry initiatives underway in this area that are very successful, and they must continue. We often say at Remington, if each of our male consumers could simply get his spouse or significant other to go to the field or range, we would double the size of this industry. Another area we have been woefully inadequate in is getting minorities, all minorities involved in the shooting sports.

SI: Remington has used some nontraditional programs to reach new customers, including NASCAR and the Internet. Why have you been so aggressive in these areas?

Millner: The NASCAR program was challenging for us in our early involvement. We are not used to finishing 30th in anything we do, so to have a Remington car, which we did six or seven years ago, that would occasionally finish in the top 10, but most of the time would finish 25th or worse, that was tough. But it exposed the Remington brand to millions of potential consumers who weren't reached by traditional industry media, either print, TV or radio.

Today, being affiliated with Dale Earnhardt Jr., the absolute hottest commodity in Winston Cup racing, has been exciting--it has been nothing short of a grand-slam homerun.

The Internet was a different opportunity for us. Like most companies before the advent of the Internet, we were pretty tough to do business with. If you didn't call us between 8 and 5 Eastern Time, we were not available to help you. Then when we did talk to you, we only gave you information in the form we wanted to give it to you. The Internet changed all that. Today, we talk to more than 30,000 Remington consumers every day through our Website.

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We find our consumers are hungry for information at a level that staggers us. The more content we provide--whether it be more detailed ballistics information, more new product information, 3D animation of our products--the more consumers want. But what's exciting is we're able to give it to people when they want to get it. It has been a tremendous tool for launching new products and for announcing promotions. It has been extremely successful.

SI: It you had a chance to address the entire industry, what would you say about today and the future?

Millner: The first thing I would say is we should be, as a collective group, extraordinarily proud of how we have been able to successfully defend our industry and everything we believe in against the antigun onslaught. We have done it through extraordinary sacrifices by a lot of people and their company's resources. I think we owe ourselves a round of applause.

Then I would say we need a healthy sense of paranoia about never letting our guard drop. We must be vigilant, because those people who believe there shouldn't be any guns in this country are alive and well. They are probably planning their next attack on us and we must be vigilant and never let our guards down. At the same time, we can't let that healthy paranoia digress into a doomsday sense about the future of our industry. The future is bright.