Few brands at the Great British Shooting Show arrive with as much history behind them as Fiocchi. The Italian ammunition maker turns 150 this year, founded in Lecco in 1876, and is marking the milestone with a worldwide campaign it calls Legacy in Motion. Yet for all that heritage, the company is refreshingly clear about why a global manufacturer still makes the trip to the NEC Birmingham – and the answer says as much about the show as it does about Fiocchi.

A 150-year-old name that still turns up in person

A century and a half is a remarkable run for any company, let alone one making something as exacting as ammunition. Across that time Fiocchi has grown from a single Lombardy workshop into a maker of shotshells, rifle and pistol ammunition and the components that go inside them, supplied to shooters and other manufacturers around the world. It has come through two world wars, repeated economic upheaval and a pandemic, remains in part a family business, and now sits within the international Czechoslovak Group. By any measure, it is an established global name and does not show any signs of stopping.

Which makes its commitment to a UK retail show all the more telling. The anniversary may be the headline, but it is not why Fiocchi values its place on the floor at Birmingham. As James Rose, chief executive of Fiocchi UK, explains in an exclusive interview, the show gives a manufacturer something it cannot get anywhere else: time, face to face, with the people who actually pull the trigger.

Why take a stand when you sell through shops?

It is a fair question, and James answers it head-on. Fiocchi sells through gun shops rather than over the counter to the public, so it does not take orders on the stand – doing so would only undercut the retailers who are its customers. A stand is also a significant outlay once floor space and staffing are accounted for. The show, then, is a shop window rather than a sales floor, and Fiocchi treats it as exactly that. For the company, that cost buys something more valuable than a weekend’s takings. “The fact that we’re able to actually stand in front of our end users and get that actual feedback” is, in his words, the whole point. The conversations on the stand – what shooters rate, what they grumble about, what they want next – feed straight back into the product, in a way no survey or sales report quite matches.

Bringing the factory floor to Birmingham

The clearest sign of how seriously Fiocchi takes that exchange came when it began bringing its own production staff to the show. Most of the machine operators and warehouse team are not shooters themselves; they watch millions of rounds leave the factory without ever meeting the people who use them. Putting them on the stand, face to face with end users, left the production team, James says, “blown away at the passion of the shooter.”

That outlook showed when Fiocchi collected its prize at the Great British Shooting Awards, the industry awards voted for by the shooting public and handed over at the show itself. The company took Game Cartridge of the Year for its Pigeon BIO – a load built around a biodegradable wad that matches a conventional plastic wad for performance while breaking down once it is in the field – and rather than send a salesperson up to collect it, James made sure the factory supervisor was on the stand to receive it. “It’s not our award as salespeople,” he says. “You guys made that product.” The show, in other words, closes the loop between the bench and the field – and the stand is the bridge in the middle.

What every exhibitor stands to gain

Fiocchi’s experience points to what the Great British Shooting Show offers exhibitors more widely. As the UK’s largest retail shooting event, with more than 2,000 brands under one roof, it puts a manufacturer in front of a big, engaged and genuinely knowledgeable audience across a single weekend – direct access that is hard to buy any other way. At a moment when the whole trade is reworking its products for the move away from lead, that unmediated line to the end user is more useful than ever: the show is where a maker learns whether a new load has actually won shooters over.

For Fiocchi the value has been clear enough that it has exhibited at the show for a number of years, committing to it early and even bringing its British marque, Lyalvale Express, to an event it had never exhibited at before. The return is not counted in cartridges sold on the day, but in feedback gathered, relationships strengthened and a 150-year-old name seen, in person, by the shooters who matter most to it.

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