Playing at Full Throttle

Bill ’86 and Adam ’89 Gardner have business savvy, competitive drive, and a passion for paintball. No wonder they’re setting the pace for one of the world ’s fastest-growing extreme sports.

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Serious paintballers keep watch on what the Gardner brothers are doing, anxiously awaiting creations like Bill’s inverted rifle barrel, which earned him his first patent in 1993. These days, Bill and Adam scramble just to keep up. "We need to produce five hundred to seven hundred guns per day," says Bill. "Soon that number will exceed one thousand. That ’s an average of one gun per minute off the assembly line."

To meet such demand, the Gardners recently purchased a second building, a former warehouse ten minutes down the road, to house an assembly area, retail store, and indoor space with synthetic turf that will allow paintball enthusiasts to play year-round.

What has made Smart Parts the supplier of choice for many enthusiasts is the electro-pneumatic gun, a high-end product with a low-end price that revolutionized the industry with its power and accuracy. These guns sell for about $300 retail, which make them affordable to consumers while providing a substantial profit margin for dealers.

Paintball by the Numbers

• Paintball is played in more than 60 countries around the world

•More than 11 million people play paintball in the United States

•Paintball is the third most popular extreme sport in the United States, trailing only skateboarding and inline skating

•7,600 paintball teams competed in more than 325 U.S. tournament events in 2003

•1.4 million people play paintball more than 15 times per year

•90% of these players are between the ages of 12 and 24. 85% are male.

•The average paintballer spends $44 every time he plays, and nearly $100 each time he visits a paintball retail shop.

•45% of frequent players come from households with incomes of more than $50,000.

Source: Paintball Sports International

Inside the manufacturing plant, the pace is brisk but orderly. Employees dart in diagonal directions from one station to another, monitoring the assembly process, checking on inventory, and cutting designs for game jerseys. In the assembly area, automated Swiss machines produce precision-made parts with impeccable accuracy. "We have the machines programmed to make exactly what we want," says Adam. "They don’t require a lot of human supervision." One such unit features a robotic arm that gently buffs an aluminum rod for a gun chamber with the care of the best shoe-shine attendant. Not far away, a forty-pallet robot system chugs down the assembly line, turning out all-aluminum markers soon to be covered by plastic, much like the type that covers cell phones.

Smart Parts is a family business with a reverse flow chart: The brothers oversee the operation and employ their parents as assistants. Bill Gardner Sr., a former lawyer, is the legal advisor, while Esther Gardner, a former chemical engineer, is the accounts payable advisor. The workforce at Smart Parts numbers one hundred and fifty and continues to grow. About 10 percent of the employees play paintball competitively. Among other perks, the Gardners allow employees to bring their dogs to work. On any given day, a handful of canines stroll the premises.

Marketing paintball products to a young, testosterone-rich consumer base involves a dose of sex appeal. The company’s Smart Parts Girls are six models, each representing a different product. Chrissy Fiok, twenty-two, a Smart Parts Girl featured in a dazzling white bikini on a $4.95 poster and on a barrel "condom," the $6 covers for the markers. She also works as a certified hydraulic forklift operator at the plant.

"It’s the best job I’ve ever had," says Fiok, who wears blue jeans and a t-shirt while motoring around the warehouse. "Things are pretty laid back, as long as everyone does their job."

The Gardners credit their undergraduate economics degrees, in part, for their success. "I learned a lot at Wooster," says Bill, who earned honors on his I.S. "The professors built you up and gave you the confidence to believe that you could be successful." Adds Adam, "I’m convinced that I learned as much at Wooster as I would have anywhere else, including the Ivy League."

These days, with a demanding schedule that includes trips to manufacturing plants in Europe and China, the Gardners have lost a little of the edge they enjoyed as professional paintball players – they won fifty-seven tournaments between 1988 and 2002. To feed their appetite for competition, Adam bought the Philadelphia Americans and Bill owns the Miami Effect, both members of the ten-team NXL.

Bringing NXL paintball to the masses is the Gardners’ next challenge. Dick Clark, the ageless business and entertainment icon, aided their cause last year by helping to get the NXL championship on television. The brothers also are working to gain exposure through the motion picture industry. They recently hosted a charity event for kids in Los Angeles at the request of Penny Marshall, executive producer of such box-office hits as A League of Their Own and Renaissance Man and star of the late-seventies TV show, Laverne and Shirley.

"Paintball is a great game, ideal as a spectator sport," says Adam. "We’re hoping that the NXL really takes off."

With their sights clearly set on this new goal, don’t expect the Gardners to sit idly and wait for things to happen.

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