10 Trends That Will Shape SHOT And 2018

By G&A Staff

With apologies to the Grinch, Christmas isn’t the only thing that comes without ribbons, comes without tags, comes without packages, boxes or bags. A mere one month after Christmas, the SHOT Show pops up from the fertile ground in Las Vegas like a spanking new Amanita Phalloides mushroom, ready for all unwary hikers.

To be honest, all of us in the industry have a love/hate relationship with the SHOT Show. It’s often our first chance to see new product, have expensive dinners with sponsors and talk to industry people we desperately need to talk to. It’s also crazy big and operating at a frenetic pace — remember, SHOT is a trade, not a consumer, show, and everyone is there to do business, not talk.

Still, SHOT is important because it gives us a window of how the industry is responding to the present “downturn.” I say “downturn” because 2017 wasn’t a bad year, but it was a drop over previous years. A lot of people in the business, especially the marketing side, have only seen the Obama “bubble” and have never had to deal with “business as usual.”

Still, in 2018 the industry is facing a couple of brutal challenges.

The first is that …Read the Rest

Source:: Guns and Ammo