Listen to this articleBullets2Bandages is a veteran-owned online retail company that offers several lines of customized products, many of which are made from upcycled military ammunition and most of which are 100% made and sourced in the United States. They started in San Diego in 2011 and recently moved to Round Rock, TX, about 20 minutes north of Austin.
Below is our recent interview with Eric Montgomery, Co-Owner of Bullets2Bandages:
Q: How did you come up to the idea for Bullets2Bandages?
A: Back in 2011 two US Naval Academy classmates of mine — Erik Rivera and Cole Evans — were wrapping up their active duty time as Explosive Ordnance Disposal officers in the Navy and were trying to figure out what to do next. One day Cole was sorting through some of his tactical gear and a 9mm round fell out on top of the dog tags he had on the floor and he thought it looked cool, so he posted a photo of it online. A few friends asked where they could get a 9mm dog tag necklace for themselves, so Erik and Cole decided to figure out how they could source and manufacture products along those lines.
Shortly afterwards Erik found a homemade .50 caliber bottle opener that he’d received from his Filipino counterpart during a deployment to southeast Asia, and they found a machine shop in San Diego that was able to reverse-engineer the cut on the casings. They soon began selling those through their first website and to a few wholesale accounts in the San Diego area.
Their first few products were all accessories and jewelry made from spent ammunition or other similar components so they adopted the tagline of “Redefining the Purpose of a Bullet.” Erik and Cole wanted to take something that was normally seen as an instrument of violence and destruction and repurpose it into something that could be used for healing — in this case, as a means to raise money for the veteran charities that they had partnered with.
I joined the company a year later after I’d gotten out of the Marine Corps and helped them continue to grow the company, working on expanding our reach through additional wholesale accounts and with licensing deals that have allowed us to expand our product lines. With Erik and Cole both moving on to pursue other opportunities over the last few years, I’ve stepped up to run most of our day to day operations along with the team of four here in Round Rock who handle our order processing and fulfillment.
Recommended: Bynder – Branding Automation, Designed To Build, Manage And Scale Brands Globally
Q: You’ve partnered with about a dozen veteran charities; could you tell us something more?
A: With me and the other two owners being veterans, the social mission of our company has been important to us from the beginning, particularly given that we got our start with a series of charity fundraisers. We started working with one or two organizations in our first year then things kind of snowballed from there.
We found that within the sphere of small veteran service organizations, a lot of them lack the resources or manpower to run an online store or manage inventory for products with their name on them — so in those situations they’re happy to have us run a storefront for their products on our website and donate 40% from each sale back to them.
In other situations, we’ve donated some of our products (or provided them at below-wholesale pricing) for our partner charities when they’ve wanted to sell them at public events or give them to donors at fundraising events. We’ve also been involved in large-scale events like the Travis Manion Foundation’s 9/11 Heroes Runs, having supplied the 3,000+ medals that they’ve presented to age group winners at their 50+ 5K race locations each of the last 5 years.
Over our 7 years in existence, we’ve donated at least 15% of our annual profits to our charity partners and in several years our donations have amounted to significantly more than that amount in terms of percentage of our net profits.
Q: Tell us more about your products, what do you make?
A: Our top-selling products since we first started have been our bottle openers made from upcycled military ammunition — we sell them in a few different sizes and styles, but our biggest sellers are the ones made from spent .50 caliber casings. They’re pretty impressive especially if you’ve never handled large-caliber ammunition — a .50 caliber round is about 5.5” long and the diameter of your thumb, and weighs in at 4oz. We buy the spent brass from government liquidation auctions and have them run through a CNC machine to add the bottle opener notch, reload them with a pulled .50 caliber bullet, tumble them clean, then add custom engraving to turn them into gifts.
In addition to the charities that I mentioned above, we’ve also got trademark licensing agreements with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, West Point, USNA, and VMI that allow us to offer our products with those logos and insignia, which makes them popular gifts for anyone who is or was in the military.
For our first few years in business we focused mainly on marketing to the military, veteran, veteran charity, shooting, and outdoorsman type markets, but then we realized that a lot of people were buying our products and having them engraved with names, dates, “Best Man,” and so forth. Since then we’ve been putting most of our focus into pushing our products for customized groomsmen gifts as we’ve found success with being able to market to people who are looking for unique personalized gifts for their wedding party.
Additionally, we sell through 100 or so wholesale accounts ranging in size from Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops, and the Marine Corps Exchange all the way down to small breweries and souvenir stores across the country that want to sell our bottle openers and shot glasses with their logos engraved on them.
Recommended: Songfinch Makes It Easy To Create The Most Unique Gift Ever – A Personalized Song
Q: What is the goal you’re aiming for?
A: While we plan to continue running Bullets2Bandages and expanding on our charitable efforts for the foreseeable future, we understand that a relatively small segment of the overall wedding market is going to be interested in .50 caliber bottle openers or revolver shot glasses for their groomsmen gifts. As such, there’s going to be a bit of a low ceiling on how much we can grow while selling a fairly narrow lineup of products given that a handful of other companies also make similar products.
For that reason, we recently launched our new site at Groomsmen Central, which is still a bit of a work in progress but will offer a much wider range of wedding gifts that appeal to a broader audience. Our goal with that site is to eventually become a one-stop shop for everything wedding related — not only gifts, but also plenty of useful information for guys who are in the “I just got engaged and don’t have a clue what to do next” phase.
Activate Social Media:
