Nickel and Lace Owner: This Is Not Your Daddy's Holster
Nickel and Lace owner Marilyn Smolenski on the company's fashionable gun accessories geared towards women.
As gun sales surge in 2016, with the FBI processing a record number of background checks in July, an increasing proportion of that demand is coming from women. As a result, some women entrepreneurs are finding opportunity in mixing firearms and fashion, a combination that gun makers have largely ignored for decades as they focused their marketing on male customers.
These products are designed for women, by women – and they aim to offer a stylish look and practical way for women to carry their guns.
Nickel and Lace owner Marilyn Smolenski discussed how she came up with the idea for her company, which is targeting the growing demographic of women gun owners.
“I was taking some class with my husband back in 2011, and I just wasn’t satisfied with any of the holsters that were on the market. They were all really geared toward men, and men’s bodies, not women’s figures, so I made my own,” Smolenski told the FOX Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo.
“At the time most of the manufacturers were just making products smaller and turning them pink and that was how they were marketing to women, so there wasn’t really anything for a woman’s body and for our curves and I definitely saw something, a need there on the market for new items for women,” she said.