In 1948, David Pearsall Bushnell returned from his honeymoon in Japan with 400 pairs of pocket binoculars. They sold like hotcakes by mail order from back home in California. Within five years he was importing millions of units of his own patented designs to satiate a demand for good optics quickly growing alongside the outdoor recreation boom of post-war America.
Mr. Bushnell sold his business to Bausch & Lomb in 1971, remaining a vice president until retirement three years later. The company continued to grow and evolve, moving from San Dimas, California, to Overland Park, Kansas, in 1992. New leadership and investment led to innovation and product firsts like laser rangefinders, and trail cameras, while adding more brands, including Tasco, Weaver, and Simmons. Their markets expanded to hunters, birders, golfers, servicemembers, even astronomers and astronauts.
The man who brought high quality, affordable optics to the American people passed in 2005, a week before his 92nd birthday. His legacy endures in the quality, accessibility, and innovation still synonymous with the brand that bears his name. As that business migrates to the Mecca of the hunting industry, fans and skeptics alike will soon witness a new era of serious sporting optics.
Range Finding
Southwest Montana’s Gallatin Valley has long served as a capitol of sorts for outdoors enthusiasts and outdoors businesses alike. Ringed by the Bridger, Gallatin, Madison, and Tobacco Root mountain ranges, a hiker or hunter need not travel far in any direction to find themself immersed in wild country. Two of the four entrances to Yellowstone National Park lie within two hours of town, along with several designated wilderness areas, two ski resorts, dozens of streams, and millions upon millions of acres of public lands.
Vista Outdoors acquired Bushnell in 2013, followed by the backpack and hunting gear company Stone Glacier in 2021 and Simms Fishing in 2022, two respected businesses at the core of the Bozeman community. The next year, Vista leadership announced they were partitioning their outdoors products and shooting-related businesses into two separate, publicly traded companies, Revelyst and the Kinetic Group respectively. Before long, it simply made sense to relocate the performance outdoors portfolio under the same roof.
Carlos Lozano is the marketing director for Bushnell and Stone Glacier. A 10-year Bushnell veteran, he was among the group that migrated north to initiate this effort “There wasn’t anything about Kansas that really said ‘Bushnell,’ and there wasn’t anything about Bushnell that said ‘Kansas,’ aside from the great people. From the direction of the brands and the DNA it made more sense to move Bushnell, since it was going to be part of the performance group, to Bozeman where there were other brands that had very, very deep resonating connection.”
Big mountains are a proving ground for any type of gear"
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Being in Montana also meant that Bushnell staff could use their products in the environments they were designed for. Big mountains are a proving ground for any type of gear, especially optics. With such places right out the backdoor from the office, product engineers and marketers don’t have to guess what features and designs are necessary.
“Since I was a kid growing up in Kansas, I dreamed of living in Montana,” Lozano said. “Now I get to use our products every day—in the mountains, not just the flatlands. That fires us up.”
Jason Tillinghast is Revelyst’s vice president in charge of Bushnell and Stone Glacier. He takes great pains to not use corporate double-speak phrases like “synergy,” but they can be hard to avoid when trying to describe the magic that’s happening at the now-former Simms Building in Four Corners on the west side of Bozeman, now called the Bozeman Innovation Center. Bushnell has always built hard goods. Simms, Stone Glacier, and Blackhawk primarily build soft goods, including storage for devices like optics. In the very near future, you can expect to see close collaboration between all these brands.
“We’re already collaborating with Simms on bino cases and with Blackhawk on red dot holsters,” Tillinghast said. “It’s real. It’s working.”
He says that their thinking behind putting everyone from wader makers to optics engineers in the same building was that the collective enthusiasm and capability would allow them to do things no competitor ever could. A random comment at the proverbial water cooler can now go from whim to physical product in the span of a normal workday.
“From a conversation to a sketch on a page for ideation, being able to create a prototype here in-house Day One, basically make the changes then immediately go into factory sampling is a massive improvement over the way we’ve done things in the past,” he said. “It’s more than an office. It’s an innovation center.”
Optical
Clarity
“It’s more than an office. It’s an innovation center.”
Depth field
Every legacy brand experiences growing pains. Decades of expansions, acquisitions, wide-ranging military contracts, and private equity transitions spread Bushnell far and wide, though not always with a clear direction. Purpose-built products proliferated, sometimes leading to duplication of efforts.
“I think when I joined, we had 54 product families and 472 SKUs, many with overlapping price points,” said Josh deFlon, director of merchandising for Bushnell. “Even people who worked here didn’t always understand what we offered.”
The problem wasn’t quality. It was clarity.
“Bushnell has always delivered more than people expected for the price,” deFlon said. “But that value got lost in the noise.”
Recent years and months have seen a renewed effort to solve that issue. Consumers often like to be able to easily choose between products on the shelf or the site. So, the team has endeavored to simplify their product selection to make choices easier “It was kind of a hard reset on the product assortment to make a clear and concise product lineup that not only the retailers could understand but also the consumers,” deFlon said. “And it was a big SKU rationalization project that we did to pull out all these older legacy SKUs to make room for these new lines of product that are much easier to understand.”
Where they’ve arrived is the R-Series. Built with the bleeding edge of optical technology, including EXO Barrier waterproof and anti-fog lens coatings and seriously grippy, durable exteriors, these rugged tools serve as the flagship for a renovated Bushnell.
The R3 collection is a simple, no-nonsense design intended for newer entrants into hunting and performance optics. The R5 binoculars, scopes, and laser rangefinders provide more features and even more vivid detail. The R7, coming next year, will introduce Bushnell’s audience to a whole new class of glass.
“The goal is to be the most trusted optics brand, not just the best performance because that’s relative,” Lozano said. “That’s where we started, bringing in all of our history as we work on this brand presented to consumers. I think the assortment is going to do a better job telling that story: what it’s for, why you use it.”
In nearly 80 years in business, Bushnell has never strayed from its mission to make optics available to everyone. Still, some observers conflate affordability with cheapness.
“People always say ‘you get what you pay for’ with optics,” said Dawson Smith, product marketing specialist. “Bushnell has always given more than that—and that wasn’t always understood.”
Image Magnification
A key component of the Bushnell team’s push to reinvent and reinvigorate has been meeting consumers where they are. That’s why many of them regularly attend Precision Rifle Shooting (PRS) and Total Archery Challenge (TAC) competitions—not only to sell products, but to talk with hardcore hunters, shooters, and archers about the what’s important to them.
“We’re not asking ‘What do you want?’” Lozano said. “It’s ‘Where do you get hung up?’ ‘What’s the one thing that bothers you about when you’re in the field, when you’re in a tree stand, when you’re holding your bow while you’re managing a rangefinder?’
“I think that’s what Bushnell has been historically good at is solving those problems and we’re going to continue to do that,” he continued. “It’s just we need to do a better job explaining how we got there and then why it can help you.”
This helps both their marketing and product development processes immensely, deFlon agrees.
“Engineering a product in a vacuum, in a building, wondering, what is the best possible thing?” is difficult, he said. “You can go out to an event and it’s not a thing that matters, but something you hadn’t considered that seems so much simpler—whether that be the case or how it attaches the lanyard, even the noise it makes. And so it’s about deciphering what are the features people truly care about out in the field versus sitting at your desk trying to work with laser modules and beam divergence and all these things. And then in real use case it might not matter.”
Glass often falls in line behind the weapons, even the clothing and footwear, in the totality of a hunter’s kit, deFlon says.
“If you’re thinking about your optic, something’s going wrong,” he said. “Our goal is for it to just work. Like car tires—you don’t think about them until they fail.”
Hunters are a particular bunch. If any given product does not meet expectations at the moment of truth—whether there’s a target or a bull downrange—they may never forget it.
“And everything actually starts with the end user and comes back to make sure we’re not trying to push out to the world to say you need to use this or something else,” Tillinghast reiterated. “We’re solving for what people are looking for specifically. It all centers around the consumer. Everything’s about the customers.”
“If you’re thinking about your optic, something’s going wrong”
Bushnell has magnified many memorable moments from the 20th and 21st centuries—from President Nixon viewing the Apollo 11 splashing back down on Earth on its return from the moon to every kid who spotted their first buck through a set of Bushnells.
What started with David Bushnell’s suitcase full of trinkets became a global manufacturing powerhouse, but never entirely lost sight of its original mission: providing the American people with the binos, spotters, scopes, trail cams, and rangefinders they want at a price that makes sense.
As its 80th anniversary approaches, Bushnell remains dead-set on reclaiming its title as America’s optics company. Being surrounded by mountains and sister outdoor brands will help, but it’s the people, the institutional knowledge and the passion for stunning visuals that will continue driving the business into the future.
“What is the new brand? It’s not new, it’s really just the same thing,” Lozano concluded. “The things you love about Bushnell are going to continue to move forward. The things that may have been pain points are going to be addressed. If you wrote us off, you’re not interested, you will need to check us out. It’s not a reinvention. It’s just the thing I think people always hoped we would become.”
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Jason Tillinghast is Revelyst’s vice president in charge of Bushnell and Stone Glacier. He takes great pains to not use corporate double-speak phrases like “synergy,” but they can be hard to avoid when trying to describe the magic that’s happening at the now-former Simms Building in Four Corners on the west side of Bozeman, now called the Bozeman Innovation Center. Bushnell has always built hard goods. Simms, Stone Glacier, and Blackhawk primarily build soft goods, including storage for devices like optics. In the very near future, you can expect to see close collaboration between all these brands.
“We’re already collaborating with Simms on bino cases and with Blackhawk on red dot holsters,” Tillinghast said. “It’s real. It’s working.”
He says that their thinking behind putting everyone from wader makers to optics engineers in the same building was that the collective enthusiasm and capability would allow them to do things no competitor ever could. A random comment at the proverbial water cooler can now go from whim to physical product in the span of a normal workday.
“From a conversation to a sketch on a page for ideation, being able to create a prototype here in-house Day One, basically make the changes then immediately go into factory sampling is a massive improvement over the way we’ve done things in the past,” he said. “It’s more than an office. It’s an innovation center.”
“We’re already collaborating with Simms on bino cases and with Blackhawk on red dot holsters,” Tillinghast said. “It’s real. It’s working.”
He says that their thinking behind putting everyone from wader makers to optics engineers in the same building was that the collective enthusiasm and capability would allow them to do things no competitor ever could. A random comment at the proverbial water cooler can now go from whim to physical product in the span of a normal workday.
“From a conversation to a sketch on a page for ideation, being able to create a prototype here in-house Day One, basically make the changes then immediately go into factory sampling is a massive improvement over the way we’ve done things in the past,” he said. “It’s more than an office. It’s an innovation center.”
A key component of the Bushnell team’s push to reinvent and reinvigorate has been meeting consumers where they are. That’s why many of them regularly attend Precision Rifle Shooting (PRS) and Total Archery Challenge (TAC) competitions—not only to sell products, but to talk with hardcore hunters, shooters, and archers about the what’s important to them.
“We’re not asking ‘What do you want?’” Lozano said. “It’s ‘Where do you get hung up?’ ‘What’s the one thing that bothers you about when you’re in the field, when you’re in a tree stand, when you’re holding your bow while you’re managing a rangefinder?’
“I think that’s what Bushnell has been historically good at is solving those problems and we’re going to continue to do that,” he continued. “It’s just we need to do a better job explaining how we got there and then why it can help you.”
This helps both their marketing and product development processes immensely, deFlon agrees.
“Engineering a product in a vacuum, in a building, wondering, what is the best possible thing?” is difficult, he said. “You can go out to an event and it’s not a thing that matters, but something you hadn’t considered that seems so much simpler—whether that be the case or how it attaches the lanyard, even the noise it makes. And so it’s about deciphering what are the features people truly care about out in the field versus sitting at your desk trying to work with laser modules and beam divergence and all these things. And then in real use case it might not matter.”
Glass often falls in line behind the weapons, even the clothing and footwear, in the totality of a hunter’s kit, deFlon says.
“I think that’s what Bushnell has been historically good at is solving those problems and we’re going to continue to do that,” he continued. “It’s just we need to do a better job explaining how we got there and then why it can help you.”
This helps both their marketing and product development processes immensely, deFlon agrees.
“Engineering a product in a vacuum, in a building, wondering, what is the best possible thing?” is difficult, he said. “You can go out to an event and it’s not a thing that matters, but something you hadn’t considered that seems so much simpler—whether that be the case or how it attaches the lanyard, even the noise it makes. And so it’s about deciphering what are the features people truly care about out in the field versus sitting at your desk trying to work with laser modules and beam divergence and all these things. And then in real use case it might not matter.”
Glass often falls in line behind the weapons, even the clothing and footwear, in the totality of a hunter’s kit, deFlon says.
Bushnell has magnified many memorable moments from the 20th and 21st centuries—from President Nixon viewing the Apollo 11 splashing back down on Earth on its return from the moon to every kid who spotted their first buck through a set of Bushnells.
What started with David Bushnell’s suitcase full of trinkets became a global manufacturing powerhouse, but never entirely lost sight of its original mission: providing the American people with the binos, spotters, scopes, trail cams, and rangefinders they want at a price that makes sense.