Alright, hopefully most people have had a chance to sleep on this and reign it in a little bit.
Like some of the people here have pointed out, the only thing changing with this is the name engraved on JUST the TL3 and SR3 receivers. ZAI has been engraved on ALL of our Origin actions and, if you call our shop, you've been greeted with Zermatt forever.
We know this isn't going to be easy. We know it's going to irritate some people. We know it's going to create confusion. But we also know this is the right decision for us to create brand clarity.
When we say "brand clarity," we say it because there are multiple other entities in the firearms industry using the Bighorn name on either products or in their branding. We even sell our actions to a company with Bighorn in their name and there is no relationship between us other than the business we do together. There's another manufacturing company with Bighorn in their name and every year at SHOT, we get dozens of people coming to our booth asking to see their product, not ours. That's tough to overcome using the same name as someone else.
We chose Zermatt Arms first because we already have ZAI on our FFL so we can use that to engrave actions. Second, our home base in Bennet, NE is the home of Zermatt Tool, a state of the art machine shop that specializes in manufacturing parts for aerospace, bio-science, food industry and other industries. These capabilities have made action production more accurate and efficient than we could have ever dreamed of. Zermatt Arms (ZAI/Bighorn Arms) has been producing actions here in Bennet since 2015. There's more information about the origins of the company on our soon to be old website in the about page.
This change wasn't an overnight decision. There were a lot of factors that went into this decision and a lot of time spent discussing the decision. We had been discussing this change before the Origin was released about 2 years ago. We feel we've made the right decision and hope all of our loyal customers will continue to support us and we look forward to impacting new shooters and people in our community.
Thank you for everything you do, SH Forum and Members. Let's have some fun this year, alright?
- Ray