WieBad started the way most good things in this sport start: two hunting buddies and a long drive. Robert Badgett and David Wiese met in a gun shop around 2005, introduced by a mutual friend, and became the kind of friends who plan their years around hunts. On the drive out to mule deer camp in Terlingua, Texas, in 2009, they talked about the dream every shooter has on a long highway — a company of their own in this industry, so there’d be more time and money to hunt and shoot. A few days later, on the back of a four-wheeler headed up the plateau to scout, the name hit like a ton of bricks: Wiese. Badgett. WieBad. Robert turned around and raced back to camp. David thought it was clever too — right up until the realization that a company needs more than a name.
The first plan wasn’t bags. The honest version: the idea was to be the Nike of the shooting industry — order gear, put a badass logo on it. (The first planned product was a trailer-hitch toilet seat for a certain buddy’s campsite. We’ll spare you the details. Somebody else eventually built one; we laughed.) Then in 2010, David — shooting matches at Rifles Only in Kingsville back when the Sniper’s Hide Cup ran there — decided he wanted a better rear bag, bought a Consew sewing machine, and made one himself. Shooters on the firing line noticed it. Then they wanted one. Just like that, the company was born — and to this day, shooters still ask to run our gear on the line to see if it’ll help them.
| 2005 | Two hunting buddies meet in a gun shop, introduced by a mutual friend. |
| 2009 | Terlingua: the dream on the drive out, the name on a four-wheeler. |
| 2010 | David sews the first rear bag on a Consew. The firing line notices. WieBad Gear is born. |
| 2011 | LLC formed. Production runs out of a bedroom, then Robert’s Man Cave. |
| The shop: 1,000 sq ft, then 3,000, today 6,000 — with room to double. | |
| 2024 | David retires (December 31) and sells his interest to Robert, who carries the same philosophy and the same approach to building new gear. |
| Today | Five of the world’s top ten depend on WieBad for stability in competition — and most of our bags go to people who’ll never shoot a match: hunters, ranchers, cops, dads on a Sunday with a .22. Same bench, same stitching, same fill scales. |
About that “more time and money to hunt and shoot”: we ended up with less of both, reinvested into the shop and the people in it — and we wouldn’t trade a thing.
The bag that started as a cylinder
The Fortune Cookie didn’t come off a drawing board — it came off the bench, out of a product we already made: the Range Cube. We dissected one — cut an arch into the cylinder, flattened the top — and the shape that came out changed positional shooting. For years the 1000D version even carried the working name: DRC, the Dissected Range Cube.
That history is why the Fortune Cookie behaves the way it does. A bag born from a cylinder keeps a round base — a low center of gravity and a straight-walled arch that drapes and hugs whatever it’s set on, while the rifle presses its own shooting channel into the top. The stability advantage isn’t a feature we added. It’s the shape the bag was born with.
Sewn, filled, and repaired in College Station
Every bag is cut, sewn, and filled in our Texas shop, and ships filled — ready to shoot. When one takes a puncture years from now, it comes back to the same bench that built it. We’d rather fix your bag than sell you a new one →