In my last Industry Insider blog, I was talking with Sturm, Ruger & Co., CEO Michael Fifer at the IWA firearms and hunting trade show in Nuremberg, Germany, about foreign trade restrictions on American-made firearms. We also discussed some of Ruger’s recent successes including the Ruger LCP.

“Didn’t that gun set a record for sales when it was introduced?” I asked. “Something like 50,000 guns in one day?”

“More,” Fifer said with a smile. “Try twice that.”

“Really?”

“Actually, it was 110,000 guns on the first day of the SHOT Show in 2008,” Fifer corrected.

“That must have blown your projections out of the water?”

“We would have been happy with orders for 25,000 pistols. We had no idea the LCP would be that popular,” Fifer acknowledged.

We talked about the concealed carry market and how the little .380 had hit at just the right time. “But,” Fifer added, “We followed that up with the LCR, the first polymer framed revolver. That gun has been very well received as well.”

I was then treated to a full “features and benefits” spiel by the CEO himself. He walked me through a comparison of the LCR to the relatively clunky SP-100, both .38 Spl. snub-nosed revolvers but one clearly smaller and lighter. He asked me to dry-fire the LCR, after he personally opened the cylinder to make sure the gun was unloaded.

“I’m impressed with your gun handling,” I said. “Most guys don’t do that with trade show guns.”

Fifer looked at me with one of those well-of-course looks that CEOs are good at giving and said: "Thank you."

I tried the trigger and it was remarkably smooth and even throughout its travel.

“See? You’re surprised, aren’t you? It’s smoother and easier than you expected, isn’t it?” he said, now in full salesman mode.

I allowed that it was indeed a good double-action trigger pull.

“That’s because we told the engineers that we wanted a curve like this… “he sketched an even, smooth arc” … and not like this… “he drew a sharply rising arc, which dramatically dropped off.

“That’s a normal double-action trigger pull. See how it spikes and then drops off? That’s hard for a woman to pull. It’s about 12 pounds of pressure at the beginning of its travel when it’s the hardest to reach the trigger, and then it drops. Our new LCR trigger is smooth throughout its travel.”

I commented that Ruger seemed like a whole new company, from the décor in the booth to the fresh look of the ads to the SR556, and Ruger’s new proprietary calibers from Hornady.

“Business is a lot easier when you give people what they want,” Fifer said. “We listen to our customers. We go to the market to tell us what to build. Look, Bill Ruger was a once-in-a-100-years phenomenon. He was a visionary who intuitively knew what the market wanted, but we don’t have any visionaries like Bill Ruger anymore. I’m certainly not one, Chris Killoy (Ruger’s vice president of sales and marketing) isn’t one. We now look to our customers to give us their vision of what we should build,” Fifer explained, a perfect articulation of a market-driven approach.

I asked if that was an aspect of a “lean” manufacturing approach.

“Not really. Lean refers to a process-driven manufacturing methodology, which we certainly use, but our product development process, in which we solicit input from our customers, is really not what I would call a part of being lean,” Fifer answered.

When prompted to elaborate on how Ruger comes up with its grand slam home run new products, like the LCP and LCR, Fifer said that a product development committee meets quarterly to discuss possible new guns. The committee is composed of engineers, salesmen and marketing people, plus himself, a total of about 25 people.

“That’s a lot,” I commented.

“And we all rely on input we receive from special groups of shooters. For instance, we sought input from the mounted shooters of Cowboy Action Shooting for what they wanted in a revolver. It took several attempts to get it right, but we finally produced a model to suit their needs,” Fifer said.

He also cited a study-group of expert varmint shooters who gave input on what features to include in a new under-development model and noted that the SR556 was the result of “input from operators in Iraq.”

I questioned that last statement. To my knowledge, Ruger has no SR556s in the sandbox.

“You’re right. We don’t have a single gun in service, but we asked operators what they wanted and they said they didn’t want a gas impingement system, that they wanted a piston system,” Fifer averred.

I asked if he was aware that an elite special forces group had been fielding HK 416s with very bad results—lots of failures—and that the shine had gone off the piston-driven apple, at least with this elite unit.

“No, I wasn’t aware of that,” Fifer admitted.

Moving back to his market-driven approach of seeking customer feedback, Fifer said that there’s a link on the Ruger Web site to e-mail the CEO. “I get about 5,000 e-mails a year. I obviously can’t reply to every one of them, but I assure you that I read every one of them. If someone wants to get word to the top guy at Ruger, all they have to do is e-mail me. I’ve called people into my office over customer e-mails. I pay attention to the customer,” Fifer said.

And with that, I thank him for his time and meander back into the aisles of IWA, still looking for something German to write about.