The partnership and succeeding corporation goes on the develop the first hammerless solid breech repeating shotgun, first hammerless auto-loading shotgun, first successful high-power slide action repeating rifle and first lock breach auto-loading rifle.
Company is reorganized as Remington Arms. Company is renamed Remington U. Remington enters the clothing and accessory business in This leads to construction of five new factories — in Lake City, Mo. That same year, Remington leaves the apparel business. Panther Arms in St.
Cloud, Minn. What remained was to increase profit margins by combining all these scattered production lines into a single megafactory. As Chandler flew with Kollitides on the plane from New Hampshire, there was every indication that success awaited them below. Guns sales are driven by anti-gun rhetoric; a popular joke in the industry is that Barack Obama was the greatest gun salesman of all time.
The numbers bear this out. The debt could conceivably have been explained by the cost of opening a new factory were it not for the fact that Remington got its factory free. Last fall, a former Remington executive, who asked that his name not be used for fear of a backlash, opened the door to his house in Huntsville and beckoned me into his study, where we sat on either side of a fireplace.
He was hired, the executive explained, as the plant was coming online, and he was tasked with wrangling together some scattered acquisitions. Executives were fired at a fast clip. Line employees came and went. Parts piled up on the factory floor. Most worrying, Cerberus, which was trying to integrate disparate brands — the father-son pastoralism of Remington with the urban-militia aesthetic of AAC, for instance — seemed to him miserly when it came to marketing.
Despite all this frenzy, he was certain that Cerberus had somehow made a great deal of money on Remington even before opening the Huntsville factory. It was obvious when the debt appeared, in I showed the filings to a professor of finance. He said it looked as if Cerberus had wound up in debt to itself. I asked Gustavo Schwed, a professor of private equity at New York University who spent 24 years in the industry, to help me review the documents.
Schwed pored over the many years of financial data and located two separate debt transactions, one of which was so esoteric I would never even have known to look for it. Together, these transactions explained not just the mysterious loan but, indirectly, the way the deal finally unraveled.
In order to buy Remington, Cerberus, as most private-equity firms would, created a new entity, a holding company. Instead of Cerberus buying a gun company, Cerberus put money into the holding company, and the holding company bought Remington. The entities were related but — and this was crucial — each could borrow money independently. Because this loan was risky — the lenders would be paid only if Remington made a lot of money or was sold — the holding company offered a generous interest rate of around 11 percent, much higher than a typical corporate loan.
When the interest payments were due, the holding company paid them not in cash but with paid-in-kind notes, that is, with more debt.
These are known as PIK notes. Cerberus would keep that money no matter what. These were garden-variety maneuvers in a private-equity buyout. In April , Cerberus did something fateful, which probably seemed smart at the time. There were plenty of sensible reasons to do this. Gun sales were high, and the debt that Remington took out was cheaper to service than the paid-in-kind debt. But there was a catch. Because the operating company borrowed the money with a normal loan — and not with PIK notes — interest payments were required in cash.
Suddenly Remington was carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that, if it could not be paid, would cause the business to go bankrupt. By the time the factory opened in Huntsville, the various players stood in vastly different positions. The private-equity firm had made back its initial investment and was playing with house money.
And its workers, urgently, had to make a lot of guns. Huntsville is a de facto segregated city. Pastor T. Johnson, of St. He was unaware South Huntsville existed until some of his Army subordinates, who were white, bought homes there. Unlike Birmingham and Mobile, there has never been a black mayor in Huntsville. Though blacks, like all Huntsvillians, paid the taxes that supported lucrative incentive packages, they seldom reaped the rewards of the best-paying jobs.
This reality was of course not felt by whites, Johnson said. The Remington factory was housed in a gray building the size of 14 football fields set back behind fencing topped with razor wire. Inside, the building was divided in half, the production line on the left and the administrative and engineering offices on the right, along with a classroom set up by the state agency that provides free worker training for private businesses.
Classes for new hires were held three days a week, every week. He resigned in and became an employee of Remington. He is best known for his series of five-shot New Line Revolvers that experimented with an ivory-like substance called celluloid. Two Remington employees, Leonard Geiger and Joseph Rider, designed one of the most iconic Remington actions—the rolling block. However, Rider had initially been hired by Remington to design pistols in the s.
He created a series of vest-pocket guns for the company, including this magazine pistol. This was the start of the race to create the best semi-auto. Designers around the world developed their own spin on the new technology, from pistols to rifles to shotguns, and even a revolver. It was such a cutthroat market that it even contributed to the split between John Browning and Winchester. This was a lost opportunity for Remington. It is believed Browning initially went to Remington, but on that day president Marcellus Hartley died.
However, it was produced eventually as the Model This was one of many autoloaders made by Remington, some more successful than others. Regardless, it has been a viable product for more than years.
The Model Woodsmaster was a semi-automatic rifle made by Remington Arms between and Like its predecessor, the Model , it came in many variations and calibers, starting with the 6mm Rem.
In , it was used as a template for the Model Initially offered in. There were several grades of Model 24s offered during its relatively short run. The Remington Model 11 semi-automatic was a recoil-operated shotgun designed by John Browning.
Ultimately Remington acquired the rights to produce the gun in the States. The great Model 8 was a semi-automatic centerfire rifle. It was originally introduced in , but the name was changed from Remington Autoloading Rifle to the Model 8 in It, too, was designed by John Browning and has been chambered in many calibers, including the. More than 80, Model 8s were produced before After it survived the great depression, Remington decided this gun needed an upgrade.
Introduced in , the Model 81 was born. It had a heavier pistol grip stock and several cosmetic changes. At the onset of World War I, Remington had few military arms beyond rolling blocks and a pistol.
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