July Continues Strong Sales Growth Trajectory For Firearms Market

Industry Growth

The firearms market grew 6% from June to July[i], with the breakout at:

Category Leaders

These categories were led by the following brands and models in terms of units sold:

Biggest Sales Increases Month-over-Month

As is true every month, some brands show larger increases than others, and some show declines.  We looked at the biggest gainers as a % of total sales in July (factoring out small brands who didn’t have a material impact on the industry).  The winners were:

The reasons for the unit sales increases are varied and can be attributed to many factors, many of which are trade secrets and market dynamics.  However, in researching each of these brands and their press coverage in the past month or two, we saw that several:

• Introduced new products or product extensions, including Daniel Defense and Benelli.
• Received favorable reviews or won awards, like DPMS, Taurus and Beretta.
• Others, like Springfield, continued their push into stronger digital advertising and content publishing.
• Lastly, there are likely impacts from inventory liquidations from The Sports Authority and others due to industry consolidation.

[i] The NSSF reports on total NICS checks data and showed a 37.6% increase from June to July.  We focus only on new long guns and handguns and filter out everything else (such as pre-pawn, redemptions, rentals, private sales, and returns) to provide a more accurate number of industry growth. 

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