What the Heck Happened to Big Green? Part 1

Remington’s gone, man. I’ll be outside. Good luck.

There was once a time in this country when the shotgun was the Remington 870 and the hunting rifle was the Remington 700. From its throne in Ilion, New York, the juggernaut affectionately nicknamed “Big Green” dispensed these and other iconic firearms like Iron Age kings shared gold rings and torcs. The laborers of Ilion were true craftsmen; wood and steel their medium. Their work meant something. The very name “Remington” commanded respect.

Those days are over. The factory floor lies silent, its lathes and mills long since shipped to greener pastures. Where for two centuries the oldest firearm manufacturer in the United States proudly produced guns of renown, all that remains is an abandoned brick husk. The sign is gone, the building sold to a development company.

Big Green’s ignominious end is doubtless a fascinating case study in complacency and mismanagement and would make for a good book, but that is a story for another day. This blog post will tell the story not of how Remington died, but instead what happened to the pieces of its corpse.

The Freedom Group Fire Sale

Eliphalet Remington II founded his eponymous company in 1816, but the company has changed ownership many times. DuPont Chemical bought Remington in the 1930s and owned it throughout its golden age in the second half of the 20th Century. The 870, 700, and 1100 were all released during this period. In 1993, Remington was sold to equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice Inc., which in turn sold it to Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., another equity firm, in 2007. Cerberus folded Remington and a few other companies it gobbled up into its Freedom Group brand, a name many readers will know and hate. After a Chapter 11 scare in 2018, Cerberus finally split up Freedom Group and auctioned off the constituent brands at a fire sale in 2020.

For those of you who don’t know, a private equity firm is the corporate equivalent of a vampire, or maybe The Blob. They shamble around the international financial system buying established companies in dire straits at a steep discount, then flip the acquired assets for a quick buck. The equity firm puts out the company’s good name like a pimp with a prostitute, trying to squeeze out as much profit from as little expenditure as possible. Once the equity firm has burned through any goodwill and human capital the brand may have had and sucked all its hard assets dry, the leftover brand name gets sold off again.

This is what happened to Remington. The iconic brand’s reputation for quality had completely vanished by the time Cerberus chopped up its corpse and sold off the bloody chunks to the highest bidder. With the background aside, this blog post is really about the aftermath of that final sale.

Enter RemArms

Two investors, Richmond Italia and Scott Soura, through their respective holding companies, formed Roundhill Group LLC, another holding company, to buy out Remington’s assets for just $13 million when Freedom Group went under in 2020. Italia had been tipped off by Remington CEO Ken D’Arcy, an associate of Italia’s, of Remington’s predicament and need for a buyer. Roundhill Group formed another holding company under itself, called RemArms, LLC, to manage the Remington Firearms brand. The name “RemArms” appears to have been chosen because rights to the Remington name sold with the Remington UMC ammunition division to Vista Outdoor, which then licensed the name back to RemArms so Remington Firearms could still use it. There exists a web of other little-documented holding companies which appear to have been stood up to handle various parts of the Remington acquisition, but without specific expertise in the area of corporate law, it is impossible to determine their exact relationship with each other and with RemArms. That said, suffice it to say, Delaware-registered RemArms is the company which currently owns the assets of the former Remington Firearms.

According to business and court filings, RemArms was formed on October 14th, 2020, then sought a loan from SIFT Capital, an international asset management firm based in Hong Kong; the latter provided a $10 million loan in exchange for a 2.5% share in RemArms.

With RemArms in place, the next task at hand for Italia, Soura, and D’Arcy was to restore operations at the shuttered factory in Ilion, NY. Rather than reinstating the 585 laid-off workers under the contract Remington had already had with United Mine Workers of America Local 717, however, the RemArms executives instead offered 200 former workers at-will employment. Under an at-will employment scheme, employees can be fired suddenly for no reason and without any recourse or severance pay. The union understandably objected, and after weeks of negotiations, the factory reopened. RemArms formally announced that Remington Firearms was back on September 13th, 2021. Just two months later, the company announced its decision to relocate its global headquarters to a new facility in LaGrange, Georgia.

Farewell to Ilion

Two years later, on Thursday, November 30th, 2023, RemArms announced it would close down the historic 1.1-million-square-foot Ilion plant for good and move all production to LaGrange. At that time, the factory which had once employed thousands of workers now had just 270 on staff. RemArms’ decision isn’t surprising; other firearm manufacturers, including Kimber and Smith & Wesson, have also moved from the northeast to states with cheaper labor, lower taxes, and more friendly gun laws.

After the historic Remington facility was shuttered in March of 2024, it lay dormant for much of the year until being bought by Turin Management LLC, a property developer from Florida; although the building had been listed for $10 million, the actual sale price is not publicly known. With that, Remington’s 196-year history in Ilion came to a bitter and unceremonious end. Whether the promised 856 jobs associated with the LaGrange factory have materialized is unknown. At the time of writing, RemArms is not hiring.

Remington Today

If you go to your friendly local gun store today, you’ll likely find Remington shotguns and rifles on the rack behind the counter. Indeed, the historic Models 870, 1100, and 700 are back in production with their receivers bearing the Remington logo. The company itself, however, is as good as gone. The building is gone. Most of the workforce is gone. The name and logo are gone, licensed back by a holding company owned by other holding companies. Much of their product line is gone and no new models have been announced. The lifetime warranty is gone—in fact, new Remington firearms are offered without any written warranty whatsoever.

Big Green now exists in a state of undeath, a zombie company uprooted from the village and the sprawling factory complex it once called home. I hope the storied company can return to its former glory, but it should by now be clear that I’m not holding my breath. The king is dead. Long live the king.