It's not often the New York Times prints a 6000-word feature coming to the defense of a gun manufacturer.
The piece is well-sourced and spills a lot of secrets about the changes Cerberus made at Remington since buying the company in 2007. The way the article tells it, everything was fine until Cerberus signed Remington up for a bunch of debt that the company couldn't pay once demand plummeted after the 2016 election.
As a proximate cause of the bankruptcy, yes, that's fair. But that's really a trailing indicator of the company's troubles. In the gun world, we know the problem started long before 2016, with something much more fundamental: people didn't like Remington's products anymore.
No business can survive long without making something people want.
On that front, Remington had two issues at the same time. First, the low-quality work that Cerberus cultivated destroyed Remington's reputation. Second, this happened at the same time that two once-in-a-generation growth areas appeared in the gun industry: the rise of the AR-15 ecosystem, and the concealed carry revolution. Remington completely missed the boat on both. It had a stretch like Microsoft had during the Ballmer era, missing every single paradigm shift for 10+ years straight.
So by the end of that, you have a Remington that was:
Burning its reputation for quality, just to hit quarterly targets. (Don't eat your seed corn.)
Unwilling or unable to launch new products that people want, especially in the highest-growth areas of the industry. So it was stuck relying on legacy products (the 700 and 870) in the lowest-growth, lowest-margin verticals.
Breeding discontent in its workforce. And with shoddy-but-cheap hiring and training practices, they were investing in lowering, not raising, the expertise of whoever stuck around.
All of that happened long before the post-2016-election downturn. Spring 2017 saw NICS checks down by 15-20% compared to the year-before period. That's not good, but it's nothing that would kill a healthy company. But a company coasting on old reputation and old products, and carrying a maxed-out credit card? Yeah, that's fatal.
To be clear, Cerberus was managing Remington, so Cerberus was responsible for all of these issues. But in its focus on esoteric financial engineering and the 2016 election, the NYT completely missed a reality that is obvious to anyone in the gun community—Remington went bankrupt because they stopped making products people want.
I know this is a very old article, but is there any backup of the history of Remington's demise mentioned? The link is very dead.
The link to OSD 11? All our Mailchimp links from before we moved to Substack are dead, but here's a copy-paste. The NYT article it refers to is at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.html
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It's not often the New York Times prints a 6000-word feature coming to the defense of a gun manufacturer.
The piece is well-sourced and spills a lot of secrets about the changes Cerberus made at Remington since buying the company in 2007. The way the article tells it, everything was fine until Cerberus signed Remington up for a bunch of debt that the company couldn't pay once demand plummeted after the 2016 election.
As a proximate cause of the bankruptcy, yes, that's fair. But that's really a trailing indicator of the company's troubles. In the gun world, we know the problem started long before 2016, with something much more fundamental: people didn't like Remington's products anymore.
No business can survive long without making something people want.
On that front, Remington had two issues at the same time. First, the low-quality work that Cerberus cultivated destroyed Remington's reputation. Second, this happened at the same time that two once-in-a-generation growth areas appeared in the gun industry: the rise of the AR-15 ecosystem, and the concealed carry revolution. Remington completely missed the boat on both. It had a stretch like Microsoft had during the Ballmer era, missing every single paradigm shift for 10+ years straight.
So by the end of that, you have a Remington that was:
Burning its reputation for quality, just to hit quarterly targets. (Don't eat your seed corn.)
Unwilling or unable to launch new products that people want, especially in the highest-growth areas of the industry. So it was stuck relying on legacy products (the 700 and 870) in the lowest-growth, lowest-margin verticals.
Breeding discontent in its workforce. And with shoddy-but-cheap hiring and training practices, they were investing in lowering, not raising, the expertise of whoever stuck around.
All of that happened long before the post-2016-election downturn. Spring 2017 saw NICS checks down by 15-20% compared to the year-before period. That's not good, but it's nothing that would kill a healthy company. But a company coasting on old reputation and old products, and carrying a maxed-out credit card? Yeah, that's fatal.
To be clear, Cerberus was managing Remington, so Cerberus was responsible for all of these issues. But in its focus on esoteric financial engineering and the 2016 election, the NYT completely missed a reality that is obvious to anyone in the gun community—Remington went bankrupt because they stopped making products people want.