Safariland

Safariland has been making protective and tactical gear since 1964, when Neale Perkins started the company in Sierra Madre, California to build a custom holster for his father. Six decades later it has become one of the best-known names in law enforcement and military equipment, now operating as the flagship brand of Cadre Holdings, a publicly traded safety equipment company, and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida with several hundred employees across its own operations. Body armor is one of Safariland's core product lines, covering soft ballistic panels and hard armor systems built to protect officers and soldiers against handgun and rifle threats. The company has a long track record supplying armor to federal customers, including a recent selection as ballistic panel provider for an FBI armor contract, work that sits alongside its long-standing law enforcement vest business. Its armor systems are built to the same ballistic standards used across the body armor industry, and the company positions itself as a full-line supplier rather than a maker of a single flagship vest.

Holsters and duty gear are what Safariland is most identified with historically, and the line remains extensive, spanning retention holsters for handguns, magazine and equipment pouches, and duty belts used by patrol officers and military personnel worldwide. The recently launched SafariVault family of duty holsters reflects continued investment in that original product category even as the company has diversified well beyond it. Communication products, including headsets and equipment built for tactical team coordination, extend the duty gear line into a category closer to soldier systems than traditional leather goods. Less-lethal weapons and munitions are another significant part of the business, covering the batons, chemical agents, and specialty impact munitions used by law enforcement and corrections agencies for crowd control and use-of-force situations that fall short of deadly force. This line, along with forensics products used for evidence collection and crime scene processing, rounds out a portfolio built primarily around law enforcement rather than pure military end users, though its armor and duty gear sell into military and federal markets as well.

Since being acquired by Cadre Holdings, Safariland has operated as that company's largest and most recognized brand, with Cadre's public reporting giving outside observers more visibility into the business than most privately held protective equipment makers offer. The Safariland name itself, though, remains attached specifically to the holsters, armor, less-lethal, and duty gear lines that built its reputation over sixty years, rather than to Cadre's other brands. What sets Safariland apart from a pure armor or pure holster maker is that a single officer or soldier can be outfitted almost entirely from its catalog, holster, belt, armor, less-lethal tools, and the forensics kit used after an incident, without switching to a different supplier for any one category. That breadth, built up over decades rather than assembled through a single acquisition, is why the Safariland name still carries weight in law enforcement circles even now that it operates under a larger public parent company.