THE HISTORY OF PRIMOS HUNTING

 Ask any hunter who makes the best game calls and chances are you’ll hear the name Primos. Will Primos, to be exact. As a 5-year old boy in Jackson, Mississippi in 1958, Will wanted nothing more than to tag along on duck hunts with the older boys in the family. When the day finally arrived, he was hooked on hunting for life. And a legendary journey that helped teach an entire generation become better hunters began.

In 1963, at the age of 11, Will crafted his first a duck call after a special day spent hunting in green timber with his Uncle Gus. “Uncle Gus was an expert duck caller, and I was absolutely enthralled hearing him make that call sing. That was my first experience witnessing the magic. And when I got home, I made my own call by copying my uncle’s.”

Will continued to hunt through high school and into college. “Anything that flew, crawled, walked or swam, I was after it.” Along the way, he tinkered with nearly every too of hunting he could get his hands on. From duck calls to his own first bow if Will couldn’t buy it, he simply made it.

After graduating from college 1974, Will went to work in the family restaurant business. By then, Will had started turkey hunting. That Fall, Will’s life would forever change with a chance meeting of the owner of a local turkey hunting camp. Her name was Eleanor Roessler. Seeing his interest in learning all he could, she showed Will the mouth calls she had made by hand.

“Uncle Gus was an expert duck caller, and I was absolutely enthralled hearing

him make that call sing."

He went home and started making and perfecting his own calls out of tin beer cans.

By 1976, word of Will’s new mouth calls began to spread. “There was a sporting goods store in town called Hunt and Whittaker,” he says. “I was selling my double and triple frame reed calls for $20 apiece.” Before long, Will’s phone started to ring with calls from around the country. It seemed Primos mouth calls were getting a reputation and people wanted to their hands on them. “Some guy from Pennsylvania came hunting in Mississippi and bought one at the store and took it back with him,” he says. “He had a store up there and he wanted to carry them. Suddenly, I had a dealer in Pennsylvania.”

Demand for the calls grew and by 1979, Primos Yelpers had to a small staff of people making call to keep up with demand. Soon after, Will expanded the line. “I had a couple of friction calls, more mouth calls, and a call case,” he says. “A lot of little things.”

In 1983, Will took his first real step toward marketing his calls with a pioneering idea for the time: instructional audio tapes of actual hunts.

“I hired a guy who followed me around in the woods,” he says. “The top-of-the-line equipment for field use at that time was a reel-to-reel recorder. It was big and cumbersome. We would set up on a turkey, and he’d set out the microphones and load the reels. Then he’d record these hunts with me calling and turkeys answering. I put them on audiotapes with instructions about how to use different kinds of calls.”

In 1985, Will made Primos Yelpers a family business by hiring his cousin, Jimmy Primos, to manage the company. Will decided that hearing the calls work wasn’t enough. People had to see them work to believe it. “I hired a local videographer, Boyd Burrow, to come out in the turkey woods with me to create a video showing my calls at work,” says Primos. “The first video I put out was called Spring Turkey Hunting with Primos.”

The success of the video led Will to create the TRUTH series of videos, now a legendary series covering decades of turkey, deer, elk, predator and waterfowl hunting. The popularity of the videos soon led Will to the Outdoor Channel where the popular Primos’ TRUTH About Hunting TV show now airs.

Despite all his successes with the company, Will didn’t make the mistake many young entrepreneurs make – he kept his day job. He continued working at the restaurant until 1989, using his salary to support his family so he could put everything he made from making game calls back into the company.

“I worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he says. “We kept growing and growing. I would travel any time I had time off, go promote, go to shows, go give seminars.” The strategy worked. The company reached a million dollars in sales, and still Primos kept working at the restaurant and putting money back into the company and building inventory.

“I just worked extra-long and extra hard to be sure everything worked right, and Jimmy did a good job with the company,” he says. Soon, Primos Yelpers became Primos Hunting Calls with a sales rep group, nationwide distribution and the legendary slogan Speak The Language.

As the company grew, Will never stopped tinkering. “If something could be made better, we would.” From ground blinds to shooting sticks to trail cameras, the people of Primos led innovations in products through breakthrough design, quality workmanship and materials, and strict field-testing by expert hunters.

“We said that if we wouldn’t hunt with it, we wouldn’t sell it.”

Today, Primos Hunting makes over 600 products with worldwide distribution through our headquarters in Flora, MS and our game call factory in Brookhaven, MS. And to this day, Will’s boyhood excitement for hunting and passion for making better products drive everything we do. From the Game Call Council to our latest TV Shows and Stream The Language YouTube Videos, Will reminds us daily that at the end of the day, our company’s success comes down to quality, and a belief in what we’re doing. “Everyone here is a hunter. If we don’t use a product and don’t believe in it, we can’t sell it. If it’s not our heart and soul, we aren’t going to do it. We’re going to keep on caring about the products that we manufacture. Because the bottom line is, we are our own customer. That’s the foundation of the whole company.” And that’s why our call grows stronger every day.

VISTA OUTDOOR INC.

Vista Outdoor is a leading provider of innovative outdoor products that enable our customers to achieve rugged independence in the activity of their choice. Vista Outdoor operates in two primary business segments: Shooting Sports and Outdoor Products. Our portfolio includes well-respected brands designed to bring the world outside.