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True Evolution in Concealment: Bringing Science to Hunting

By Michaelean Pike

When you first start learning about HECS, it’s easy to get distracted by all the technical information. There’s the Faraday cage principle, for example, which is the basis for HECS Energy-Cloaking Fabric. You could get caught up in trying to understand electromagnetic field emissions.

Oh, and then there’s the sharks.

All of that is interesting and important. But the most important thing to know about the company is that, at its heart, the story of HECS is really about a bowhunter who wanted to get as close as possible to the animals he pursued. In the process of doing that, he and his team developed a technology that has the potential to save lives and is poised to fuel a global brand.

That bowhunter is Mike Slinkard, president and founder of HECS. A lifelong bowhunter and archer, Slinkard grew up in rural eastern Oregon surrounded by elk, mule deer and other animals.

“For me, the thrill of bowhunting comes from getting close to animals and being able to go one-on-one with an animal on his own terrain,” Slinkard explains. “I do a lot of spot-and-stalk hunting, so it’s critical that I’m able to read an animal’s body language to understand what he’s likely to do when I get in close. That’s what gets me where I’m going—being able to get close to animals, read their body language and outsmart them that way. Really the crux of HECS comes from that.”

Running one successful archery manufacturing business would be enough to keep some people busy. After all, Slinkard is also the president and founder of Winner’s Choice Custom Bowstrings, a premium bowstring manufacturer now in its twelfth year of business. But Mike Slinkard’s natural curiosity and obsession with getting close wouldn’t allow him to just sit back.

“I’m always looking for answers to the problems bowhunters face,” Slinkard says. “That’s been a large reason for our continued success at Winner’s Choice and now further success with HECS. It seems I’m always involved in one project or another trying to figure out what’s causing problems and, more importantly, how to solve those problems.”

One of the problems Slinkard puzzled over was how animals seemed to pick up on a hunter’s presence for no known reason.

“It started with a conversation I had with a Winner’s Choice employee who was working for me at the time,” he says. “We were looking at some video just talking about why animals act the way they do. When we get close to animals, it usually doesn’t take much time before the animals’ body language changes and they start looking around more, feeding less and are just more on alert. We finally came to the realization that there had to be a physical cause for those reactions.”

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