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Viper Archery Products

Quality Born of Necessity

By Bill & Sherry Krenz

Few things can be as motivational as necessity, even to a twelve-year-old.

“When I was twelve,” says Rick Clark, “a family member introduced me to bows and arrows. And even though my very first bow was little more than a toy, I felt the necessity to make that little bow shoot better by improvising a makeshift sight. I scrounged up a small, unfinished piece of wood and taped it to the front of the bow with electrical tape. I then borrowed a number of stick pins from my mother’s sewing basket to be inserted into the wood to be used as sight pins. Just like that, I was in business.”

Decades later, Rick Clark genuinely found himself in the business of making quality archery products.

“Archery grew on me and on our entire family,” Rick adds. “By the time I was in my teens I was shooting a lot, bowhunting and competing in local archery tournaments. My parents had also gotten involved, and together we helped found a local archery club. By the time I entered my late 20s, I was an avid competitor in the national IBO and ASA tournaments. Groups of us would band together, travel to those far-flung tournaments and compete. For nearly seven years I shot in the pro class, learning as I went and always searching for those equipment secrets that would make me better.”

At the same time, Rick began to make his own archery scopes and stabilizers.

“That, too, was born out of necessity,” reveals Rick. “I wanted a better, clearer, stronger scope, and the only way I knew how to get it was to build it myself.”

Fortunately, Rick’s education and background allowed him to do that. College courses in engineering and machining had led to a career in those areas. His first serious job was with a company that built mining equipment. Rick did a lot of machining and strength testing on enormous mining machines for that company.

“One particular piece of equipment I worked on weighed over 250 tons. It was used in coal mining, and the stress testing I did on its many parts was very important.

“Later, I joined a company that did a lot of work for the military. That involved lots of very precise machining of parts and also some design work. One of the more interesting projects I worked on was creating the delayed detonating head for 25mm mortar shells. Those shells were intended to pierce through an outside wall to the interior of a building before they exploded. As you can imagine, that special mortar head contained lots of small, intricate parts that had to all work together perfectly.”

That work experience provided Rick Clark with both a unique set of skills and a particular mindset.

“The scopes I had been using just weren’t all that good,” Rick remembers. “They weren’t that clear and they certainly weren’t overly durable. In fact, it was amazingly common for the scope stems to break in the midst of competition. I decided to do something about it.”

Rick leased a small mill and a lathe and set them up in his garage.

“My car got wet, but my scopes got built. The first thing I did was to apply what I knew about materials and design testing to formulate a better, stronger and more reliable scope stem. I then improved the precision of the lens housing and secured clearer lenses.

“At the same time, I began to make my own stabilizers. I was having trouble finding available stabilizers with the sort of weighting that I wanted.

“At first, my scopes and stabilizers were made solely for my own use. But then, gradually, friends and acquaintances began asking for them. Eventually, I decided to sell a few to a local archery shop, mainly to see if that shop’s customers would also find them appealing.”

Rick knew the archery business, having owned and operated his own archery shop—Rick’s Archery in Huntington, West Virginia—from 1993 to 1996.

“The reaction to my improved scopes and stabilizers was quite good. So good that I decided to make up a bigger batch and take them to the very next national IBO tournament. That tournament was the First Leg of the IBO Triple Crown in Bedford, Indiana. The year was 2002. I knew that I would be able to parade my products before the hundreds of top-notch, and very critical, shooters at that event. With my car loaded to the gills, I traveled to Bedford and set up a booth.”

The response to Rick’s new scopes and stabilizers was overwhelming. By the end of that long weekend, Rick had sold every scope he’d brought along and had taken orders for more.

“When I returned home, I knew I had some decisions to make. I had a good job, but I envisioned owning my own archery-equipment manufacturing company. After much soul searching I arranged to take a leave of absence from my regular job in order to better explore the possibility of my own archery company.

“My scopes and stabilizers seemed a hit, but I also felt I needed more. On the way back from Bedford I mentally began developing ideas for a complete archery sight line. I also developed the name Viper Archery Products.”

Rick’s initial Viper Archery dreams and goals were simple but lofty.

“I wanted to design, manufacture and offer only quality archery products. I had years of experience creating and producing ultra-precise parts, products and machines, and I believed that I could carry that over into vastly improved archery items.”

Rick leased a 2,000 square-foot space in a local building and purchased a single CNC machine.

“I added other peripheral machines, but Viper Archery Products pretty much started with that one CNC and me. At first I had no employees. I’d simply work 14 to 16 hours a day and did everything myself from start to finish. Often, I made component parts all day long at the shop, and then assembled my products on my kitchen table at home at night.”

The demand for Viper Archery Products grew rapidly, and so did the company. Two short years later, Viper was bursting at the seams of its leased manufacturing space.

“Necessity said we needed more room,” Rick recalls. “To maintain the quality and throughput of our parts and products, we desperately needed considerably more work, office and warehouse space. Yet the financial commitment to obtain that space was daunting. I suppose every growing business faces this dilemma. In the end, I purchased our own 15,000 square-foot building and moved forward. I can’t say that it wasn’t scary to make that move, but at the time it was also rewarding to just be in that position.”

Today Viper Archery Products prides itself on offering innovative, quality American-made archery gear.

“We have dramatically expanded our product offerings and even our building since moving into our facility six years ago. We’re now 20,000 square feet and have nearly two dozen full and part-time employees. In addition, we’ve added a new CNC machine every year to better meet demand. We now have a total of seven CNC machining centers. We’ve also added full in-house camo-dipping capabilities. That’s made us almost completely self-sufficient. There are only a few things, like screws, that we obtain from outside sources. That allows us to fully control both our throughput and our part and product quality. Just as soon as you begin sending things out for work, you lose too much control, and I refuse to let that happen.”

The product line of Viper Archery Products has grown with the company. Today Viper offers an extensive lineup of sights, scopes, stabilizers, an innovative D-Loop Pliers, a unique practice target and more. It is probably best known for its expansive offering of sights.

“Quality archery sights, in all popular price ranges, have become our bedrock,” says Rick Clark. “We specialize in excellent fiber-optic sights, from feature-packed expensive sights to quality sights that offer bowhunters the very best in value. We offer sights for nearly every archer and every archery scenario.

“At the top end are our MicroTune sights. They take a backseat to no sights on the market today. Next up are our Pro and Viper series sights. They offer stainless-steel fiber-optic pins, sleek and durable designs, precise and secure windage and elevation adjustments and ultra-bright extended fiber optics. We also offer superb slider sights in our QuickSet series and huge-bang-for-your-buck economy sights in our QuickLock sight lineup.”

Today’s Viper scopes are highly respected on the tournament trail. Their housings are fully CNC machined from aircraft-grade aluminum and feature a threaded Viper lens retainer for easy lens replacements. All Viper scope lenses are best-quality Zeiss lenses. Viper scopes win every weekend.

“Viper stabilizers are unique. Each is precisely machined for the proper weight and size characteristics and then filled with shock-absorbing pellets. With each shot those special pellets squelch shot noise and especially shot vibration like never before. They’re available in three lengths and three camo finishes, including Lost Camo. And on top of all that, Viper stabilizers are surprisingly economical.”

One of the most useful archery tools to be introduced in decades is the Viper D-Loop Pliers. There’s nothing else quite like it.

“Once again necessity is the mother of invention,” confides Rick Clark. “I worked closely with Edgell Terry on the development and design of the D-Loop Pliers. D-loops offer significant shooting advantages, but installing such D-loops on bowstrings was never easy or convenient. The truth was that it was difficult to tie consistent, safe D-loops from bow to bow. The Viper D-Loop Pliers changed all that. With the Viper Pliers, installing D-loops suddenly became easy. D-loops could be made the same length each time and knots could be pulled as tight as possible. Shop owners and individual archers now recognize the Viper D-Loop Pliers as one of the most useful bow-setup tools to ever come down the archery pike.”

This last year, Viper Archery Products jumped boldly into the world of archery targets. Rick explains.

“Stacked-foam archery targets abound today. But many suffer from a malady that serious archers call slivering. With repeated shooting, the thin foam layers in many of those targets get punctured and torn, and small slivers of those layers get pulled out of the targets with the arrows. Once that begins, the target loses compression, gets looser, begins not to stop arrows and wears out at a quickly increasing rate.

“To completely eliminate that nagging tendency, we created The Barrel Target by Viper. Astute archery dealers and serious shooters quickly began calling The Barrel the most innovative foam target in years. The Barrel utilizes a unique and now patented wrapped-foam construction. The foam is actually coiled within the target and you shoot into the sides of the target.

“Because The Barrel by Viper does not rely on layer compression for target integrity, The Barrel tends to hold up much longer than most conventional stacked-foam targets. The Barrel also lasts longer because it offers a full 360-degree shooting surface. If, after a great deal of repeated shooting, you begin to wear out one spot on The Barrel, simply rotate The Barrel a few degrees to access a brand new and pristine shooting surface. The longevity of The Barrel by Viper Archery Products is simply amazing.

“And to boot, at just $69 suggested retail, The Barrel by Viper is also wonderfully affordable for archers. We introduced this amazing new target in 2009 to lots of interest. It looked different, it performed better, it lasted longer and it was most reasonably priced. The Barrel by Viper Archery Products has been a huge hit.”

When asked about the keys to Viper’s fairly rapid success, Rick is candid.

“Our dreams and goals for Viper Archery Products haven’t changed much since the early days in 2002. We still want to design, manufacture and offer only quality archery products. But as we’ve matured, we’ve learned that there is even more to becoming a successful small business. For example, today we strive to continually develop and introduce new and innovative products for archers. At the 2010 ATA Archery Trade Show in January we’ll unveil three brand new Viper Archery products that no one will want to miss. We’ve also redoubled our efforts to maintain the sort of product quality that has become our longstanding hallmark. There are very few work days that I don’t head out onto the production floor to personally inspect and check the parts and products we’re making.

“We’ve also learned the value of superlative customer service, a constant sales philosophy and the maintenance of a realistic and down-home view of archery, archers, archery dealers and archery distributors.

“Our customer service is second to none. It’s a priority with us, as it is with our many customers. We have also focused our sales efforts, since our very beginning, on those retailers and wholesalers whom we believe form the archery industry’s back-bone—independent, local archery dealers and distributors. Maybe it’s my archery-shop background, but we love all those local hardworking archery dealers, and we enjoy partnering with every one of them, large and small.

“Finally, to pull everything together, we believe in a down-home, grassroots view of archers, the archery industry and life. We’re in this because we enjoy the sport. We still shoot, compete in archery tournaments and bowhunt as much as we can. We’re just like our customers. My dog Chessy even comes to work with me every day.”

Necessity is a powerful motivator. At twelve, Rick Clark was fabricating sights for toy bows. Decades later he created a quality-based archery-equipment company because he felt driven to produce better archery gear. Today Viper Archery Products stands as an example of what need, dedication and hard work can do.

For more information on Viper Archery Products, please call (740) 894-6100 or log onto viperarcheryproducts.com.

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