I toured Blue Alpha Gear, and it was awesome.

Blue Alpha Gear extended an invite to me, freely and without any promises, to take an afternoon and come tour their facility. I jumped at that opportunity, and here are the pictures.Now those of you who know me well will raise an eyebrow at this occurrence. I haven't worn a nylon belt and, in fact, I don’t even own any. I own a few more than a dozen leather gun belts from a variety of those major manufacturers, but I don’t own a single nylon belt. Blue Alpha Gear has emerged as one of the leading manufacturers of nylon gun belts in their short sub-three year history, and this explosive growth was why I jumped at the opportunity to come hang out with Kurt and Jesse, the two owners and founders of Blue Alpha Gear, for an afternoon.Blue Alpha Gear is located in Newnan, Georgia, a small Atlanta suburb located just thirty minutes south of the Atlanta airport. Beginning in Jesse’s garage, they have now expanded to three suites encompassing 5000 square-feet in a truly impressive repurposed cotton mill. The interior showcases massive wood floorboards, exposed brick walls, megalithic beams, enormous open-floor plans, huge windows, the hipster dream.Inside the hipster paradise, a Blue Alpha Gear logo is printed on sheet metal and fixed to a brick wall. The wings on the logo appear to be an homage to the two owners' former career as Delta mechanics. After being led through the large floors of sewing machines, around and through tall racks with shelves packed with large wheels of 1.5” webbing and bulk boxes of Cobra buckles, one of the first questions I had for Kurt and Jesse was about their growth. I learned that Blue Alpha Gear uses minimal/no marketing aside from Kurt’s /u/BlueAlphaGear reddit account, and they don’t run advertising campaigns. They have partnered with a few large YouTube accounts and co-branded products, but their growth has been entirely organic and spread via word-of-mouth… a sizable percentage of which is traced to reddit.Less than three years later and through this word-of-mouth growth, they now provide belts for federal agencies, local law enforcement, private security, and, most surprisingly, international sales are one of their fastest growing segments. But above some really neat contracts which these two guys have landed, the one Blue Alpha Gear asset which they were most proud to showcase was their in-house workforce and manufacturing. Every belt which is shipped with the Blue Alpha Gear logo is made in-house, by free Americans, assembling and sewing the belts. This is in contrast to a large number of their competitors whose products are made by big automated machinery run by Chinese labor camps... or even, as I learned, the US prison system. That’s not what Kurt and Jesse wanted for Blue Alpha Gear, and they were proud to introduce me to their employees- who have pumped out tens of thousands of belts using the American-made, free-market, livable-wage industry.I brought some-dozen or so of my collection of leather belts for Jesse and Kurt to see. Unbeknownst to me, Kurt and Jesse didn’t have much experience handling leather gun belts and so this was a neat opportunity for all of us! I had the opportunity to handle and try the Blue Alpha Gear products, and they had the opportunity to get their hands on leather belts.I took some pictures for you all. I hope these pictures can communicate what a really awesome place this is, and an employee workforce who is happy to make these incredible products. I was happy to write this post, under no obligation nor implied or promised compensation, just to share a cool experience I had with Kurt, Jesse, and the employees at Blue Alpha Gear.http://bit.ly/2EghoM8 via /r/CCW http://bit.ly/2TROG9S