In the highly saturated world of outdoor manufacturing, creating a new product is difficult. Creating an entirely new category out of your residential garage borders is extremely difficult.
Yet, that is exactly what Derrick Ratliff, founder of Horizon Firearms, accomplished. Driven by farm-forged grit and an absolute refusal to draft a “Plan B,” Ratliff disrupted the legacy custom rifle market and pioneered the .22 Creedmoor—a cartridge that has since gained widespread adoption in the industry.
In a recent episode of Y’all Street, Ratliff sat down with host Tarek Saab to decode the grassroots marketing, product innovation, and supply chain strategies that allowed Horizon Firearms to scale from 250 guns a year to a projected 10,000.
The Power of Counter-Positioning
When Ratliff launched Horizon Firearms in 2012, he surveyed the landscape of custom gunsmiths and noticed a lack of personality.
At the time, a “custom” rifle generally meant paying a premium for a highly accurate weapon built on a standard action with a plain, painted stock. They shot well, but they looked boring. Ratliff saw an opportunity for aesthetic counter-positioning.
“I can build these custom guns… and I can do individual flair on it so that your gun and my gun are not the same, and then when you go to hunting camp, you can explain it,” Ratliff noted.
Horizon Firearms leaned heavily into the “cool factor.” They introduced custom Cerakote finishes and cosmetic machining, such as aggressively fluted barrels. When purists argued that fluting compromised accuracy, Ratliff proved them wrong by delivering half-minute-of-angle (MOA) accuracy guarantees out of the box. By selling visual expression backed by elite performance, Horizon carved out a fiercely loyal customer base.
“I didn’t care about building a gun for the guy who’s buying it. What I care most about is his grandkid. I want to build something that when he passes it to his grandkid, the grandkid remembers the story.”
Derrick Ratliff
Inventing a Market: The .22 Creedmoor
Horizon’s true inflection point arrived when Ratliff applied his philosophy of “try-storming”—a process of skipping endless boardroom brainstorming in favor of immediate, real-world prototyping.
Competitive predator hunting in Texas is a high-stakes game where teams compete for payouts exceeding $50,000. In these competitions, every second counts, and tracking wounded game costs valuable time. Hunters needed a high-velocity, low-recoil cartridge that delivered devastating terminal performance.
Collaborating with David Stroud and other industry peers, Ratliff experimented with necking down a 6.5 Creedmoor brass casing to accept a .22 caliber projectile.
“We made one, and it fed like a dream… and performed better than the 22-250 that we were using,” Ratliff explained.
The grassroots adoption was noticeable. Much like local dirt-track racing—where competitors buy the winning driver’s engine—predator hunters who lost to the .22 Creedmoor immediately called Horizon Firearms to buy the exact same rifle setup.
Securing the Supply Chain
A custom rifle caliber is useless if the customer cannot buy the ammunition to shoot it. To force the .22 Creedmoor into the mainstream, Ratliff needed the backing of a major ammunition manufacturer to achieve SAAMI (Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute) standardization.
After years of casually pitching Hornady executives at trade shows with little traction, Ratliff secured an unexpected, face-to-face meeting with a top Hornady marketing executive in a bathroom at the Dallas Safari Club convention. That pitch led to a formal sit-down, nearly a decade in the making.
Partnering with Texas Ammunition (a Kaspar Companies subsidiary) to provide purchase orders, Ratliff proved the market demand was real. Hornady is committed to producing the brass and loaded ammunition at scale. By securing the supply chain, Ratliff ensured that the .22 Creedmoor wasn’t just a garage-built “Wildcat” round—it was a permanent fixture in the global firearms market.
Scaling Through Strategic Acquisition
As demand for the .22 Creedmoor rapidly increased, Horizon Firearms faced the classic entrepreneurial trap: they were selling too much product to keep up with production. Sourcing actions and stocks from third-party vendors resulted in unpredictable lead times and cash flow crunches.
To secure his supply chain vertically and to help realize his vision, Ratliff made the strategic decision early on to merge Horizon Firearms into the Kaspar Companies ecosystem. This provided the capital and operational infrastructure needed to bring component manufacturing—like the cutting-edge, skeletonized “Wombat Action”—entirely in-house.
The Bottom Line
Derrick Ratliff’s journey is a masterclass in founder-led sales and unyielding perseverance. He didn’t wait for industry permission to innovate; he utilized his network, leaned into aesthetic differentiation, and forced legacy suppliers to recognize a new market.
By eliminating the safety net of a “Plan B,” Ratliff ensured his only option was to execute.
Watch Derrick Ratliff discuss the growth of Horizon Firearms and the outdoor industry on Episode 7 of Y’all Street.
