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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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The plastic grips and triggers[2] for the P250 may be dirt-cheap to make on a per-unit basis, but the moulds for that plastic are incredibly expensive

How do smaller companies like Wilson combat make aftermarket grips at a profit? Are they using a different manufacturing technology, charging more, or riding on the original SIG R&D?

The MBA-generalized response to this would be:

When you are selling low volumes to highly motivated customers, you can capture niche's (or "sub markets") by doing a lot of direct marketing and building brand loyalty.

When you're operating at scale (Glock, SIG, et al) you have to go after larger markets with customers who blend concerns beyond ultra performance (i.e. price) and so you start to make some level of compromise. This is where your strategy comes in; are you the "cheap" brand (Taurus, I guess? idk), are you non-innovative but dependable (Glock), are you the innovator (SIG ... I guess?) etc.

The same logic can be applied to a lot of different industries.

As an aside, but it's interesting, this is why there are dozens or hundreds of ultra-speciality rifle manufacturers. Some only specialize in barrels and then plop them on other companies' hardware. Many of these places like to boat about their contracts with the Navy SEALS / Special Forces / CIA whatever. In reality, this can be 1 - 3 guys in their converted garage more or less hand making every product they ship.

They're selling to a price insensitive (gov't dollars!) ultra-niche customer with super high performance requirements and, to no small extent, the "fuddlore" mentioned above. More charitably, customers operating at that level of performance just tend to develop biases that are mentally hard to shake. Does the trigger being polymer-x instead of polymer-y make you shoot better? Probably not, but being mentally comfortable with your gear probably does make you shoot better.

What happens to shops like this is they either go out of business because they lost one key customer (often, their only customer) or they become reliable enough lifestyle businesses for the owners - they make a very comfortable living and work on something they have a genuine passion for. Very few of these companies get purchased by one of the big names in the gun world unless there's something truly interesting going on. Things like actually interesting engineering development, perhaps something patented, or the development of a new product or market. Custom, tricked-out AR-15s weren't really a thing until after the Global War On Terror was several years into its run but, then, dudes who never go to the range were suddenly ready to drop a few thousand dollars into AR mods. Enter Bravo Company Manufacturing and all the others like it.

From the looks of Wilson Combat's products (in particular) it looks like they're banking on people buying their product to change something about the grip angle of the gun (there are a couple of them that mimic the 1911/DWX) or to have a convenient way to make it heavier.

(Why you'd want to make a plastic gun heavier like that instead of just buying something like a Q5SF Match is another question entirely, but it's not like it costs WC anything to market it as "you could do it".)

For the P365 in particular, the WC grip is a affordable replacement with ergonomics (thickness) that many people prefer. Weights can be added as well, for those who want them, for recoil management.

There's a huge aftermarket parts industry for both the P365 and P320 because of their modularity.