It's been an exciting year at Tulster! Earlier this year we faced a crossroads in our business. Questions seemed to leer over us… Do we continue releasing new holster products to our customers or do we place our R&D on the backburner to better our current products and processes? As many of you already know, we decided to backburner our product releases in order to work on the internal functions of our manufacturing. WOW, how it’s changed everything and been eye opening along the way!

In the early months we moved quickly away from the old style foam presses to split boards on vacuum formers. This gave us consistent molded shells but we were still using a bandsaw and belt sander for trimming and shaping our gear. As a result, each holster was slightly different. We were less than satisfied with the quality and purchased our first CNC machine in March. After several months of planning, training, programming, and testing we started milling out our tooling from CAD designs. We then quickly started to use the CNC machine to route the formed holster and mag carrier shells giving us unprecedented consistency. The CNC process has given us the ability to keep up with demand far exceeding what we thought possible with our small team.

As of October 1st we were excited to finally have all models on our new CNC milled tooling and routing paths. We will continue to perfect the tooling and routing paths over the next few months, but the bulk of that project has been completed.

We didn’t stop there… one of the main issues we were facing was the edge finish of our gear. Although a polished edge finish was great looking, it raised some challenges for long term growth. After testing many different edge finishing options, we decided on a matte finish. As of November 15th, you will notice all of the new holsters and carriers sporting the new matte finish. *there is a chance that some orders may include gear with both matte and polished edge finishes due to in-stock inventory. If this happens to you and it's an issue, please let us know. We will do what we can to resolve the problem. 

As many of you already knew, our website was in great need of some major upgrades. In late November we started the groundwork for upgrading our store framework and user interface. In the beginning of December we released a fresh new look to our website which made it even easier to browse the Tulster inventory on your computer, smartphone or tablet. 

Our goal here at Tulster has always been to offer the best customer service and innovative products. It’s been an absolutely awesome year with many changes and we are looking forward to 2017. New products are on the horizon and don’t ask, we aren’t telling.  :-)

NEW SPLITBOARD TOOLING FOR M&P SHIELD LEFT HAND

NEW SPLITBOARDS FOR OTHER PROFILE HOLSTER MODELS

HOLSTER SHELL READY FOR MILLING

SHELL MILLED AND READY FOR FOLDING AND EDGE FINISHING