I love rags to riches stories. I’m not sure you can get much more humble than the first few years that Wildlife Research Center was in business. John and Brian Burgeson are the American Dream personified.

Like many of today’s deer scent companies, Wildlife Research Center grew from a passion for trapping. As teen-agers in the mid 1960s, John Burgeson and his brother, Brian, spent much of their free time running trap lines. To improve their success, the brothers constantly experimented with scents resulting in a keen understanding of how to combine odors to attract animals and how they react to different scents, including human odor. After time, the brothers perfected their scent concoctions and began selling scent to other local trappers. But they certainly weren’t ready to quit their day jobs.

As deer populations rose in the early 1980s, John and Brian became interested in deer hunting and naturally took their knowledge of scents and began formulating a buck lure. Just like their trapping products, it also sold well, locally. However, it wasn’t until 1983 that they incorporated their small business with the intent of selling their products nationally by mail order.

“Don’t let anyone tell you mail order is easy,” John laughed. “We were excited about our new company and had big goals. The first thing we did was run $10,000 worth of advertising in hunting magazines for our Trail’s End #307 buck lure. That first year we sold just 200 bottles that we mixed in a salad bowl and bottled in the basement of the house using a plastic funnel! Needless to say we didn’t turn a profit that year!”

Nor the next year for that matter. In fact, it was their ninth year in business before either John or Brian took the first penny from the company. “We had other jobs and relied on them to pay the bills and put food on the table,” John said. “To make the company grow through those nine years we poured all the money back in. As we grew, we changed the packaging and added other avenues of distribution beyond mail order. We started going to trade shows and deer classics. We also put on many miles driving from dealer-to-dealer to sell the product direct. I can remember how excited we’d be walking out of a sporting goods store after selling the owner a few bottles of our scents.

“We moved from the basement to a garage and then to a barn that we fixed up for our production facility. After several years, we moved into a commercial building where we made the improvements needed to increase the efficiency of the business. Finally, in 2006 we moved to our present facility, which is even larger and more efficient.

“We had to work our way up,” John said. “Nothing came easy, but the business has grown steadily. Today, we also use manufacturer’s reps to sell the product all over the country, but Brian and I keep up many accounts ourselves. Some dealers have become very good friends dating back to the humble beginnings when we had to handle every sale ourselves.”

The W.R.C. Philosophy
“Consistency is the mark of a good scent,” said John Burgeson. “A lot of scents will work, meaning they’ll attract some of the deer some of the time. But, the best scents will attract more deer more of the time. Wildlife Research Center products go beyond basic recipes to include combinations of other natural ingredients that no other companies use. These extra ingredients ‘soup-up’ our scents a little and make them more effective under a wider range of circumstances.