A Clear View

Objective:

If you’ve been paying attention to the optics world in the past several years, even to a small degree, you know about Vortex Optics.  

The company has risen from relative obscurity to a position of prominence. If I were running an optics brand right now, these guys would be the ones I’d be most concerned about.

While they do bring a commitment to design, quality and innovation to the game — obviously required elements in an optics brand’s success — it’s the brand’s attention to customers that has won them a fiercely loyal crowd.

It’s this look at the brand that Vortex asked us to help portray to our audience. For a company that relies as much on the brand affinity they’ve earned as they do the reputation of quality that their products have generated, the amount of trust involved in this request was noteworthy.

Strategy: 

Vortex, as a brand, is personal. The relationship that they’ve cultivated with customers is not done en masse, but individually. They’ve grown rapidly because their customers don’t just buy a riflescope, use it and then shut up. They’re loud. Passionate. Convinced that you’ll make the same choice they’ve made if you give Vortex a try.

This doesn’t happen overnight; if it were easily done — or easily faked — more brands would be doing it.

I made this the focus of my attention. If we were going to tell a story, we needed to determine the manner by which Vortex had been successful at cracking this code and creating an army of advocates.

I knew a little about Vortex’s origin — really no more than that it was a family-owned company, and that several of the members of the family were still involved in running the business.

The pieces started to come together as I requested an interview with a member of the founding family.

Jimmy Hamilton is the youngest son in the family. He grew up while his parents were founding Vortex Optics, which gave him a front seat to the evolution of the business and brand.

As I got to know the family’s origins — beginning in retail, getting to know their customers, seeing their frustrations with products, companies, warranties — I could see the footprints of this brand strategy emerge.

Except that it wasn’t a brand strategy. The more I asked, the more I could see how certain elements of the way they designed products, developed policies, grew the business — it all came from experiences working in retail. 

My decision to run the Q&A was based on all of this. How could I share the information as anything but a one-on-one conversation — an intimate conversation with an intimate brand.

Some excerpts from the conversation with Jimmy:

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“You know, it can be really frustrating when you’re watching people dig through a year’s worth of receipts to find the right one, or ‘Sorry, you never filled out the warranty card, so now our hands are tied and we can’t take care of you the way we’d like to.’”

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“We all simply understand that our customers are at the center of every idea, interaction or decision. We don’t really have to put a ton of signs or reminders up on the wall to influence how we talk to VIPs — sorry, VIPs is what we call customers.”

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“There’s a lot more time spent thinking about our VIPs, what they’re doing or what they need, than, say, what our competitors are doing.”

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In writing this, I started to see what people saw in the brand. While I haven’t gone all-in and traded all of my optics for Vortex products, I did get a feel for how concerning it likely is for Vortex’s competitors.