That Was IWA 2025: Voices from the Show Floor

“We have been attending this show for 26 years – every year we are happy to have a stand here,” said Adem Kuzu, President of Yildiz Shotgun. “This fair is very important for us because we meet with our clients, and it also gives us a good chance to find potential new clients too. This year was a good show for us, we were very busy with meetings for most of the days. We produce 40,000 shotguns per year, and we export them to 60 different countries. About 90 per cent of our products are exported, so this makes attending IWA very important for us. We are known for our quality and keeping our promises, which also helps us maintain long-term relationships with our customers.”

Scandinavia was another well-represented part of the world in Nuremberg. As one of the traditional homelands of hunting, that should be no surprise. We spoke to long-time attendees FX Airguns from Sweden, whose Marketing Manager Matthias Vangilbergen told us: “It is always very interesting to meet different people in the industry and find out what is going on – this show is actually a very good place to get ‘ears on the ground’. It helps us find out what we’re doing well and what we can improve on and also get a better relationship with people we might not know so well.”

Exhibitors don’t just come from across the land to get to this carnival of hunting and shooting, they travel across vast oceans to make their pilgrimages too. There were almost 150 exhibiting companies from one of the world’s biggest gun markets, the United States, present at IWA OutdoorClassics this year, from small start-ups to major players with instantly recognisable names. One of the latter, Savage Arms, enjoyed not only the business done at the show but also the vibes.

“The show has been fantastic, and I feel that attendance has been better than last year, but more importantly the mindset has been really good,” explained the company’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing Robert Gates.

“The dealers and distributors that we have been meeting with have been very happy to be here, it seems like the economy across different parts of the globe is improving. When people are happy to be here, that’s what’s exciting. There’s an ownership in this industry, when you touch and feel a product you feel as though you can speak to it. If a dealer can say that they touched a product, they felt it, they pulled the trigger, then that translates all the way down to their customers and end consumers.”

The Home Team

But IWA OutdoorClassics would not be IWA OutdoorClassics without a strong home presence from German companies, and that was exactly how it was in 2025. Companies of all shapes and sizes covering almost every product category you could think of came from all over the host country to meet with their national and international partners – and most were not left disappointed.

“The show was very good for us – we had a lot of very good appointments, and we were very glad to see our customers again, many of which are friends,” said Andreas Zettler, Managing Director at gun oil specialist Ballistol.

“We are a fifth-generation company and many of our customers worked together with my father, and the next generation is waiting, so we are very glad to meet with them, show them all of our new products, do business with them, and support them. We introduced a lot to potential new customers, and we will see after the show how much comes back, but our main objective was to personally speak with our customers and grow our brand awareness and I think we absolutely achieved that.”

That feeling was echoed over in Hall 6 where most of the companies who specialise in tactical equipment were based. Lukas Treffer, Marketing and Communications Responsible at Tatonka, which owns the Tasmanian Tiger brand, told us that this side of IWA remains strong.

“We started exhibiting here a long time ago when we started developing our military and outdoor gear,” he said. “The interest in the tactical style of products is getting more and more interesting – these products are not only used in the military – we have found interest from people in bushcrafters, paintballers, airsofters and other outdoor lovers. I think the time for writing contracts and deals directly at trade shows is over, but shows like IWA help us get to know the right people and start relationships. It also helps inform us and find out the needs of the professionals who use our products – we have a lot of our product development team here to discuss such things.”

And finally, perhaps one of the best stories from IWA OutdoorClassics this year came from another very young Austrian company, OPOS. Its owner, Florian Tripaum, first visited the show as a teenager making his way in the industry, and the experience was so inspiring that he came back eight years later with his own company based on a pistol design he developed in that time.

“I can tell you that my first time visiting this show was eight years ago when I was 18, and this was when I decided upon my own big goal to do my own development and create my own gun and get it on the market,” Florian said.

“Today is the end result of my development journey over the past eight years and it was a great pleasure to be here. There were so many people here it was truly astonishing – I can’t thank everybody enough for their interest. We have the capacity to sell about 300 pistols a year at the moment, and they are all already gone after exhibiting here.”