Winchester Gun Safes: What's In a Name?

Does a gun safe by any other name "smell as sweet?" For Winchester Gun Safes at least, it may. Many sports enthusiasts, including gun owners, do not know that the Winchester line of gun safes is not manufactured by Winchester. The name is licensed to Granite Security Products, which manufactures the safes.

How did this situation come to be? And is it a good thing?

Winchester got its start as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, which manufactured the Volcanic lever action rifle of Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson. That company was later organized into the New Haven Arms Company, which was mostly owned by Oliver Winchester. Its Henry rifle was used extensively by Union units in the Civil War.

After the war, the company was reorganized into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (1866) and began manufacturing many other popular types of firearms. Early in the 20th Century, Winchester worked in concert with John Browning to produce several new innovative models, but it soon found it was actually competing with Browning models licensed by other companies.

Many of these other models were superior to Winchester's own models, and Winchester ended up buying and manufacturing some of these rifle and shotgun designs.

Winchester designs were used heavily in World War I, but after the war, with its extra manufacturing capacity, Winchester made a brief foray into manufacturing hardware goods, such as batteries, refrigerators, and even roller skates. This proved to be disastrous, and the company went into a receivership and was purchased by the Olin family in 1931, which quickly re-focused the company in arms and ammunition.

During the Second World War, the company made a huge contribution to the war effort. It produced 15 billion rounds of ammunition and employed 62,000 people.

During the 1960s, Winchester (now a division of Olin Corporation) began manufacturing camping equipment, and Olin also ventured into several new areas. Again, both businesses soon found that focusing on core competencies made financial sense and started spinning off non-core businesses.

Olin continues to own the Winchester name, but it has licensed that name to many different companies. In 2006, for example, Olin licensed the Winchester name to Browning for use with Browning-manufactured shotguns and rifles. The same model has been used for several other Winchester-branded products.

It was natural for Winchester to begin manufacturing Winchester Gun Safes, but, as related as gun safes are to guns, they are not the same manufacturing process, and licensing the name to a third party to manufacture the gun safes made sense.

This is where Granite Security Products comes in. Granite manufactures several gun safe products in the United States and entered into an agreement with Olin to manufacture a line of gun safes under the Winchester brand. This is what you will find at Granite today. One can find many different Winchester gun safes made for pistols, and these, as with other Winchester-licensed products, are the highest quality. However, they are not made by Winchester.

So I shouldn't have asked, "Does a gun safe by any other name smell as sweet?" I should have asked, "Does putting the Winchester name on a gun safe make it smell sweet?" And the answer is probably, "No." Adding the Winchester name to a safe will not help it hold off a burglar for six minutes. However, Granite makes only high-quality safes and can compete with any other safe in terms of cost and quality.