OWDN Managing Editor Paul Erhardt sat down with Mike Aland, Chief Marketing Officer of SilencerCo. The interview covered the company’s growth and market position, its manufacturing philosophy, customer service (including an amazing, and consistent, 24 to 48 hour warranty turnaround time), and, of course, marketing and company culture.
QA Outdoors
SilencerCo started in 2008, when suppressors were still a relatively small niche in the firearms world. Looking back, what did the company see in the market that others didn’t?
Mike Aland
That’s a great question. I think if we take the very first product, the Sparrow, the opportunity there—and maybe this is just a small way of looking at it, but I think the concept becomes universal throughout the history of the brand—the .22 Sparrow answered some questions and solved some problems that people maybe didn’t know they needed solved.
A lot of the .22 cans at that time, you’d unscrew them, push the baffle stack out, get your wire brush out, and start scrubbing and trying to clean. Sometimes a baffle sticks. Sometimes the tube gets fouled. It’s tough to get the baffles back in or locked together appropriately.
So it really became: How do we make a silencer—and .22 obviously requires a ton more maintenance than other cans—that’s more user-friendly, easy to clean, and sounds really good?
So they created the Sparrow. Part of the secret sauce is the patented clamshell design that shields the core from the tube so that, as carbon builds up, it’s easier to disassemble, clean, and reassemble.
I think the concept there is looking in spaces where people don’t look, finding products that are either categorically different or outside the thinking of the group.
I’ll give you one of the other greatest hits of SilencerCo, which is the Omega 300. At that time, people were looking for sealed 5.56, dedicated 7.62 hard-use cans, and the market was probably a little more on the tactical side of life. Our product that fit into that category was the Saker. We had a Saker 5.56, a 5.56K, a 7.62—fantastic, bomb-proof silencers.
But we saw an opportunity that was different. What started out as a PRS pet project by our founder, the guy who invented most of SilencerCo’s greatest hits, became the Omega 300. It was a can he wanted, but he actually didn’t show SilencerCo generally because he didn’t think anyone would want it given the market conditions.
That can was different. When it launched, it had a mix of materials that probably hadn’t really been seen in that combination before, and it was special. It sounded amazing with 5.56. It was a .30-caliber can that was fantastic on all the .30-caliber cartridges it was rated for.
I think that’s kind of the story of SilencerCo: looking in contested spaces and identifying opportunities within those spaces.
QA Outdoors
Early on you had the Sparrow, Osprey, Saker, Harvester, and Omega 300. Certainly the Sparrow and Omega helped establish SilencerCo during those early years. Which decisions surrounding those products had the biggest impact on the direction of the company? Would it be the Omega 300?
Mike Aland
Yeah, I think the Omega 300 really set the table for a design aesthetic, as well as performance benchmarks that other cans in the future would have to meet.
.22 is fun, and there’s only so much juice you can squeeze out of that platform. But with the Omega 300, it opened our eyes to possibilities within other specialized cans or do-all cans that allow you to shoot a ton of calibers through them.
That became pivotal for the Omega 36M and the 46M—introducing modular cans that you can shoot 9mm and rifle rounds through, and everything in between. People weren’t really doing that in such a specific and dedicated way.
Again, it’s working in contested spaces but trying to find those products that really stand out and ultimately give the consumer a massive benefit.
QA Outdoors
SilencerCo has experienced a wide range of market conditions within the suppressor space: rapid growth; post-HPA slowdown; long Form 4 wait times and then dramatically shorter wait times. The elimination of the tax stamp was massive, and now we have the NFA ruling out of Texas. What did those cycles teach the company about managing growth and forecasting demand?
Mike Aland
Ithink each of those watershed moments taught us different things. HPA was a hard pill to swallow. We were extremely hopeful. The marketing reflected that hope, and consumers adopted that hope. When it fell apart, it hurt.
I think that lesson really required an internal look at how we did business, how we managed funds, and how we allocated capital. There were some really big moments to learn from.
I think every founder-led company goes through these moments of, “Well, I’ve never been here before. What do I do?” That was one we experienced, figured out how to get through, and came out of extremely more wise and more prepared for future opportunities or setbacks.
QA Outdoors
During the Q&A with SilencerCo President Scott Clinger he was asked about the company’s greatest innovation. He pointed to the systems infrastructure SilencerCo put in place from the very beginning, including its custom ERP system, as having the greatest impact on the company’s ability to scale effectively. Today, SilencerCo accounts for 20% of all NFA suppressor registrations—is that ability to maintain operations and scale in the face of demand surges the core competency of the company?
Mike Aland
I think that’s definitely one of our strategic advantages: our ability to assess what’s coming down the road and then determine how to meet that demand.
There’s a nuance to it. We could put out a lot of silencers, but putting out silencers that have the innovation and quality we expect becomes a little more tricky. That’s something we’ve excelled at, and it has been part of the culture since it was two guys in a garage.
That’s definitely not understated in our culture and our ethos. We can always be better, but we also want to master it.
In the early days, forms were tricky. If you have a machine shop, there’s plenty of software out there that you can run a machine shop with. But then you add in the form complexity. How do we do Form 2s and Form 3s and integrate that into an ERP that makes us effective?
I would say that, in the early days, our ability and mastery of forms gave us a strategic advantage and helped us grow at a much more rapid pace than our competitors.
QA Outdoors
SilencerCo was, to a certain degree, founded on the idea that suppressors could become a mainstream shooting product. We’re 18 years later. Are we finally at the point where that has happened, or are we just now seeing the sunrise over the horizon of a new day?
Mike Aland
Ithink it’s both.
I think a lagging indicator of the growth of this particular segment in the industry is when you have storied, historical OEMs launching threaded barrels on guns that were never considered to be suppressor hosts. Lever actions are a good example of that.
It turns out that, under everyone’s nose for decades, lever guns are some of the best suppressor hosts you can shoot. The sound quality is fantastic.
The fact that you have Marlin or Henry or whoever offering threaded barrels as a factory option shows that the demand is there. A lot of these companies don’t make suppressors themselves, but they want their consumer to have a gun that is modular and can accept muzzle devices like a silencer.
Never before have there been more options for consumers to buy guns that they can throw a can on immediately. But it’s just beginning.
When you look at—I think, and forgive me if these numbers are wrong, but the premise will be the same—100 million gun owners in the United States, and I think the last stat I saw was 500 million, close to 600 million firearms that have been purchased and are in the hands of consumers. If that’s our total addressable market, and you look at how many silencers exist to this date, we’re not even scratching the surface.
The horizon’s bright.
QA Outdoors
We’ve seen significant changes in suppressor technology: titanium, additive manufacturing, low-back-pressure designs, lighter hunting suppressors, and increasingly modular suppressors. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for another meaningful technological leap, or is that hard to discern at the moment?
Mike Aland
It’s probably a little hard to discern.
We sort of distinguish between do-all cans versus what we call scalpels—super-specific cans. I think there’s a need for both.
For us, our R&D team is always looking for white-space opportunities, finding that piece of technology or innovation that puts us in a unique category. But there’s also innovation to be had in existing, known technology.
Can we do a low-back-pressure can that’s better than the one we make today? Absolutely. Can we make a 36M better? It’s been one of our best-selling cans for a number of years. We think we can make it better.
There will always be opportunity there. The hard part is when engineering gives you a list of 10 cans they can make, picking the five that we can do really well and scale at volume. That might be the harder part.
QA Outdoors
SilencerCo emphasizes that it’s nearly 100% vertically integrated. In today’s market, is vertical integration primarily about quality control, production capacity, cost, or the ability to react quickly when demand suddenly changes?
Mike Aland
The answer is yes to everything you just said, and I’ll propose a couple others.
We started the interview talking about our warranty turnaround time, stated at 36 to 48 hours. I looked at our stats over the last month, and it’s 21 hours. It fluctuates, and some of that is due to how many we’re getting back, etc., but a 24- to 48-hour turnaround time is pretty standard.
That’s impossible unless you’re vertically integrated. If you’re using third-party manufacturing, that can comes back to you, you send it to someone to fix it, they send it back to you, and you send it back to the consumer.
The way we have built our business, right off the top of production numbers, product goes straight to a warranty department that catalogs and inventories parts for every can we’ve ever made, including cans we’ve discontinued.
We used to own a company called SWR. Some of their product names still exist, but we took SWR out of the public and focused on SilencerCo. There are a number of SWR cans that we still warranty. If it comes back, we’re fixing it.
When we say lifetime, it also includes discontinued products or companies that we owned and for which we still own all the IP, but that are no longer doing business as SWR. We still warranty those.
That’s impossible unless you do it in-house.
QA Outdoors
Somebody pointed out to me—and correct me if this is wrong—that you do a significant amount of destructive testing on your products. Is it every 300th can by SKU?
Mike Aland
By SKU, yes.
QA Outdoors
That’s a massive investment in the manufacturing process in terms of time, energy, and certainly ammunition costs. Is that what keeps everybody focused on maintaining quality? And how important is that mentality of not cutting corners—not changing it to every 500th or 1,000th can, or testing by product family instead of by SKU?
Mike Aland
It’s super important to us that the silencers our end users receive are of the most top-notch manufacturing.
We do that to catch potential issues. We do it to make sure the standards we set when we put something into production are adhered to.
I’ll give you an example where this was painful for us, but it caught a problem. We had a recall, I believe it was two years ago, for I think three different silencers. It was caught in this test.
As soon as we knew we had a problem, we issued a public recall statement. The good part is that a lot of the cans affected by that recall hadn’t even made it through our distribution network. We caught it that fast.
Because of the volume we do, it was significant enough that we had to get ahead of it. That destructive testing helped prevent thousands of cans from getting into consumers’ hands and becoming a consumer problem. We were able to repair everything or replace it as needed because of that destructive testing.
QA Outdoors
Beyond that, how important is it for a company to find the problem before the consumer finds it? Because when the consumer finds it, it can undermine the credibility of the company and its product unless the company is extraordinarily good at reacting to it and fixing it quickly.
Mike Aland
I’ll give you an answer that might be a little abstract.
It’s probably cheaper to pull a can off the line and test it to destruction to make sure there are no problems in the manufacturing process than it is to have a can with a wild amount of warranty problems.
Part of the reason our turnaround time is so responsive is that we don’t get a ton of returns. That’s not to discredit the hard work our warranty department does—it only enhances it—but we’re able to be quick because we’ve done the testing to make sure the cans that go out are top-notch.
A lot of the warranty issues we see are user-generated, but we still cover them. It’s our product. We stand by it. If you have a problem, we’ll fix it.
QA Outdoors
You didn’t introduce new products at the 2026 SHOT Show because demand for existing products was so great that you had to increase production to get dealers the products they were asking for. How important is that relationship between the manufacturer and its key partners in distribution and the dealer network?
Mike Aland
I can answer a little bit of that. Not being on the sales side, I’m not super involved in those discussions.
But I know that the distributors we have signed on to work with are treated with the utmost importance. We want to make sure we’re understanding their needs and that we help adapt to the market trends they’re seeing.
We put a lot of effort and time into those relationships, and they’re absolutely key. We want to make sure that if we’ve signed someone up to be a distributor, they’re providing the customer service to their dealers that we need.
We’re a little picky about who we work with, and we have fantastic relationships with the people we do work with.
QA Outdoors
With the explosion we’ve seen this year, first when January 1 hit and now with the Texas ruling, you’ve seen substantial growth that has increased even further than you could have planned. There are also more first-time suppressor buyers coming into the market. What has surprised you most about the market so far this year?
Mike Aland
Anecdotally, the thing that always surprises me about the silencer market is that just at the point where you start thinking, “Okay, we’ve got this dialed,” something happens.
Lately we’ve been on a winning streak. From our shop side, prior to the Texas ruling, we actually had a pretty good handle on meeting demand and arranging our business to meet that demand.
Then this happens, and now we’re like, “All right, I guess we’re going to have to go back and retool a little bit on some of this.”
That’s probably my biggest surprise: There’s always a surprise.
In the more than a decade that I’ve been in and around the silencer market, it doesn’t follow a normal business cycle. There’s not a predictable trend line because there is legislation and there are laws surrounding it. As you cut some of those away, it opens up, and as more get added, it trims it down.
I think the surprise is the surprise.
QA Outdoors
I see this period not as the golden age of suppressors, but as the gold-rush age of suppressors. You’ve got established companies succeeding, growing, and meeting demand, but you also had a couple hundred new companies come into the market last year, and even more at the beginning of this year.
That increases competition, but SilencerCo is positioned differently because of its ability to scale, as well as its past experience of going through the ups and downs that these new companies have never seen or addressed. Add to that the fact that, as you said, we haven’t even scratched the surface of the potential suppressor market.
So is this increased competition something you spend much time worrying about?
Mike Aland
No. And I’ll also give a little credit to consumers.
I’ll give a small example. HPA was so damaging because people had this hope that the bill was going to get passed and you could just walk in and buy a silencer. So they stopped buying. As soon as they realized it was a real possibility, the thinking became, “I’m going to wait six months because it’s not worth the form time. It’s not worth the dollars.”
We anticipated some of that after the form times went down, and we talked about it. But what bore out was that the silencer consumer is becoming more savvy and understanding how this industry works.
From July 4 (2025) until January 1, we were pedal-down. There was never a slowdown during that time. Some of the dealers offered layaway programs to avoid the $200 tax.
QA Outdoors
And, in some cases, promotions where the dealer or manufacturer ate the tax. That had to have spurred a lot of sales that otherwise might have waited until January.
Mike Aland
Absolutely.
You couple that with silencer buyers thinking, “I know if I wait until January 1 for the Scythe-Ti or this other product that’s selling really hot, I might not ever see one again. So I better buy now because there’s so much demand that there will be a scarcity of product.”
It’s kind of fun to see companies adapt to these different market conditions. Consumers, at least in my personal estimation, are responding in a similar way.
Before, it was kind of like, “All right, guys, start buying.” But now they understand: “If I don’t buy right now, I might not have a chance to get it. It might take me 12 months to get this can that I want. I’m going to end up settling for something I don’t want because it’s available.”
QA Outdoors
With so many new owners coming into the market, does the marketing message shift from explaining why somebody should buy a suppressor to explaining which suppressor they should buy? With this explosion in sales, how is that changing your approach to marketing?
Mike Aland
That’s a fantastic question. I think we can parse it out even a little bit more.
A decade ago, I went to an NRA show. I started at SilencerCo in 2012. The first month I worked there, I went to the NRA show, and I didn’t know anything about our product. I didn’t come from the gun industry. I was always into guns—100%. I was actually a customer of SilencerCo before I worked there—but I wasn’t familiar with the product line quite yet.
So I just listened. I sat next to the sales guys and listened to what consumers were asking.
Back then it was, “These aren’t legal. You can’t sell those. You guys are felons.”
There became this instant opportunity to educate people, which we talked about the other day. One of the first campaigns was, “Yes, silencers are legal.” That was a major hurdle to overcome.
There was a lot of bad PR around silencers: These are tools of assassins and all that sort of thing. So there was a massive effort on SilencerCo’s part to educate people: Yes, you can own them.
Concurrently, we were working with ASA and helping found ASA as a founding member. Let’s get some more states. Let’s get hunting rights. Let’s open up all these opportunities.
Fast-forward to today. I think there are a lot of new facets to who we target, and some of them strategically I won’t talk about.
But you look at what the benefits are, and that question gets answered differently depending on your age and what demographic you’re in. Then there are feature sets, and that’s what I talked about earlier between a do-all can versus a scalpel.
As we see the latest and greatest caliber—I think what we did yesterday with PRS is fun because it seems like every year they’re all shooting a different caliber. There’s this new round that has a better ballistic coefficient (BC) that I can shoot farther and straighter. We have products that can address that.
So we teach people about that. My approach to marketing is that there’s not a magic key that unlocks it all. We have to get really specialized in who we talk to, where we’re talking to them, and how we talk to them.
QA Outdoors
I don’t know exactly when it rolled out, but I remember seeing the “It Matters Where It’s Made” campaign around the NRA show. That speaks to the fact that you do nearly everything in-house and control the process, which allows you to service discontinued products, go to market faster, scale faster, and deal with warranty repairs very quickly.
How do you see that campaign extending in light of the dramatic changes in the market since then?
Mike Aland
If I could have paid you $100 to ask me that question, I would have, because we’ve actually just changed the campaign.
It’s now, “It Really Matters Where It’s Made.”
Being in a position as a named plaintiff in the lawsuit opens up some pretty unique opportunities, not only for us but the other named plaintiffs, and it does further that point.
As we look at the 200 or 300 new competitors we acquired this year, as things settle out and we start to understand the landscape of what this injunction and future lawsuits will bring, we’re going to see a lot more competitors.
That drives the point home even more. When someone buys a silencer, in 18 years are they going to answer the phone and fix your problem?
That’s an honest and important question.
QA Outdoors
That was a point brought up at the NRA Show by the head of another suppressor company. He said we saw this with the AR boom: companies came in, and five years later they were gone. The companies that had been in the game for a long time remained.
That’s certainly true for SilencerCo. You have a structure that allows you to provide a product that, separate from the quality and features of the product itself, is backed by the assurance that if the customer has a problem, it will get addressed.
Do you buy from somebody who just entered the market with flashy marketing and a bright, shiny object? Or do you have more confidence in a company that has weathered the storms and has a reputation for taking care of its distributors, dealers, and customers—and can build more product when demand increases?
Mike Aland
I love that.
When we met to decide whether we were going to launch a new product this year, that was a very thoughtful and detailed discussion.
QA Outdoors
Was that hard for you as a marketing guy who always wants to talk about something new?
Mike Aland
One hundred percent.
But I signed up for it. I knew by signing up for this plan that I was going to have one of the more difficult tasks I’ve ever had as a marketer.
It’s one thing not to launch a new product in a calendar year. It’s a whole other thing to suddenly get 300 new competitors at the same time who have the latest, greatest, and shiniest products.
But I looked at it and thought: We have something that very few companies have in this space. We’ve referred to it in the past as the complete package.
First, is the product good? Does it sound good? Does it perform the way it’s expected? Does it surprise you with how well it performs? We feel like we do that, top to bottom, in our product line.
Do we have an amazing warranty with fast turnaround times? Yes, we do. There are a handful of other things.
As you start constructing this complete package of what makes SilencerCo SilencerCo, it’s taken years to create the inertia to become trusted.
You gain trust not only in the good times, but probably more so in the bad times and through problems. Take the recall I mentioned. That’s a tough pill to swallow, but we owed it to our customers to make sure we did right by them and issued a recall.
The outpouring of support for owning a mistake that we made was amazing. We had one social media post about it. That was our official announcement, and you’re reading hundreds of comments saying, “This is how you do business. This is fantastic.”
You never want a recall, but it was a nice indicator that we owned it. We made a mistake. We owned it, and people responded extremely positively to it. They were even calling out competitors and tagging them in our posts, saying, “This is how you should do business,” which we didn’t solicit.
It was one of those things where you realize that having that complete package helps weather the storm of something negative.
QA Outdoors
Let me ask you one final question because we’re running out of time.
There are all these components: the history of the company, the experience, and the foundational work of creating systems that allowed you to handle a complicated manufacturing process and scale it.
Then you have to address challenges such as demand skyrocketing. You need people working around the clock. You need everyone doing their part, whether it’s finishing, machining, QC, packaging, or shipping. Everybody has to be on board and moving in the same direction.
Speak to the culture of SilencerCo and the people and employees who make that happen. What creates that bond internally, and ultimately, how does it affect the company’s relationship with its customers, from distributors and dealers to the end user?
Mike Aland
It’s an interesting thing working on the culture of a company that has seen ups and downs and changes in leadership. Those are all super challenging.
We try to cultivate a culture where we want to succeed, and we try to give each employee, no matter what their role, the ability to succeed.
I won’t give you the exact numbers, but I’ll give you the frame of reference. The last boom that we saw comparable to the current one was before HPA. Up to a certain point toward the end of last year, the numbers were almost comparable.
We did it this time with half the employees.
That’s not to say we don’t value and love our employees, but we’ve been able to streamline and become so efficient that we can scale without adding a bunch of people whom you might have to lay off later. That’s something that weighs on us.
It’s really easy on a spreadsheet to go, “Yeah, I see this coming. Let’s add a bunch of employees, and when it levels out or goes down, we’re just going to fire them.”
We don’t operate like that.
We want to cultivate someone from Operator One through the ranks. We want to grow people into senior leadership positions. You don’t do that by adding a bunch of people and firing them depending on market conditions.
You’re smart with how you scale, knowing that this might not last forever.
When you have that environment where people feel secure in their roles, they do a fantastic job for you, and you reward them. You get to a point where those little touches of quality and that pride in where you work always translate into the final product.
The desire for people to come in on weekends and work an extra shift—they don’t do it because they get time and a half. They do it because they see the mission of the brand and they want us to succeed because they know they personally succeed in that scenario.
You start with a very thrown-around word—“culture”—but if you cultivate the proper culture, it’s evident in the product that comes out.
And not just the physical product, but the warranty, the marketing, and everything else. There’s a passion there that you can’t pay for.
It’s not a transaction. It’s earned, and it’s learned.