Antler Biz: Is It Lucrative?

I was catching up with a friend this morning and she asked about the antler business. Specifically, one of the questions she asked me was, “Is it lucrative?” Well, not really. It’s more of a side job/supplemental income/hobby. 😆 Something to fill our free time. I explained how there is a lot of work to make them into dog chews…

How we have to cut up the raw antler, and some of them are in pretty rough shape when we first buy them — full of velvet, mud, grime — and need extra pre-cleaning before we even cut them. This pre-cleaning is done by hand and it makes our hands pretty sore, especially when there is a lot of velvet…

We have to go back through all those cut pieces and grind the ends to smooth them down. Some are pretty jagged at the burr and take a good amount of sanding…

The sterilization step is the quickest since we can do them in batches. But right after they dry and cool, we are back to individual handling of each piece. We wipe every single piece with a clean rag to get any last residue from the antler chew. And it’s a necessary step, too. The rags turn brown pretty quickly and have to be swapped out…

We then weigh each piece and sort it into one of our size categories. At the end of sorting, we take a piece of colored tape to label the final product and add it into our inventory…

By the end of it all, our hands are sore. A batch of 250 pounds takes us weeks to go through.

So in answering my friend’s question, I added, “It’s like most things. The more you do, the more you make. But it is a really time- and labor-intensive job and between James going to school and me caring for the kids, there isn’t enough time to scale it to the level we’d need to pay the bills.”

We buy the highest grade deer antler, so we are paying the highest price. We don’t mark up our products because we want to remain competitive with other antler companies, even though their products may not be as good of quality as ours.