CONROE TAXIDERMY

Obviously, I was born into it but there was a time in my life when I was unsure [if that’s what I wanted to do]. I tried to do a few other things, but I just always loved the big game hunting side of it. So, it was never just taxidermy and the love of the art. It was the allure of traveling and hunting and living that lifestyle in the outdoors. I mean, I would guide and hunt, and built big habitat scenes... In the days before these foam rock products were available, we were building our own rock mountains and trees in big projects. So those were always fun. I didn’t like sitting at the desk per se and mounting head after head.

HOW OLD WERE YOU WHEN YOU STARTED DOiNG THAT?

Man, 16. I don’t know. I was skinning when I was a kid. I mean, the company’s right beside my home. So as a teenager, I was doing deliveries all across the nation. When I got my driver’s license, the day after Christmas, I was going on a delivery at 16 to New Mexico to a client’s house. It was my first delivery on my own with my buddy, but I’d been on a bunch of deliveries with the older people in the shop.

And then as I got a little bit older, I looked at doing different jobs, and [my father] would always come to me and say, “So and so company wants to pay you to guide in Colorado. You’re going to bring all the mounts back here for us to mount and then deliver to all the clients, and we’re going to pay you as well.” So, I just thought, well, that’s not really a bad business model for me, you know? And then I would work at the taxidermy job and one of our other clients was traveling to Russia or Canada, and it was, “Hey Barret, these guys are going to pay to have you go along to skin all the animals. And by the way, they’re going to buy an animal for you to hunt. And you’re going to bring everything back here on the job, and I’m going to pay you as well the whole time you’re doing it.”

So before long, I’m hiring more people, we’re doing bigger dioramas, bigger deliveries, bigger trophy rooms. And my father and my brother Travis really led in the actual mounting of the animals in the artistic side there. And I started at a very young age, really dealing with all the clients.

So, you dealt more in the trophy room aspect of the business?

I had installed so many trophy rooms that clients would call the shop, and they would want to talk to me to figure out how to integrate the animals in the trophy room, and how to turn the animals and position the animals. “Barrett, what do you think?”

I would show up to someone’s trophy room and I would rehang everything that they had on the wall and bring the animals that we had just mounted and hang them, and tell them, “Well, you’ve got too many rights. Let’s do some lefts. Or here’s a few thoughts.”

AND YOU’D USE THAT KNOWLEDGE TO HELP GUiDE THEM TOWARD ANOTHER HUNT?

You know, at a young age, I was able to go into a trophy room and realize where the clients had and hadn’t hunted before. And I got to talk to them because I had been on those adventures and trying to get them interested. They had done a bit of Africa, but they hadn’t branched up north and done some of the big concession areas or they never thought about going to Europe, but they needed Spanish ibex. And I’d see New Zealand in their trophy room, but they didn’t have Australia. And I would just know those species from being educated in it. And I would go in, so not only were we or are we still just a taxidermy shop. We do a lot of hunt consulting. And of course, now, it’s all the way up to trophy room consulting, even design, where we go in and take your addition to your home or your trophy room from the ground level all the way up. A lot of clients come to us, and they’re 25 to 50 animals into it. And they realize that they’re out of room, and they need our services. And we look at all the possibilities and kind of interview them to determine what size room a guy might need. Then I would visit with the clients, and that’s what I do today.

YOUR BROTHERS WORK WiTH YOU AS WELL.

My brother Travis executes all that with the taxidermists to actually getting the mounting done and deciding who’s mounting what. My other brother, Michael, runs the tannery. So, we all kind of really have our own niches within the company.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR FiRST HUNTS.

My first safari, I was 14. My first animal, I must have been six or seven. I shot a whitetail and then went on to shooting other Texas native and exotic game. But yeah, my first safari was in 1986. I went to Zimbabwe.

SO, HUNTiNG AND TAXiDERMY HAS PRETTY MUCH ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF YOUR LiFE?

Oh yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I got off the school bus and went to work, then we shut the shop down and maybe did one or two pages of homework if I had to, and then played and went to sleep. I mean, I was, I remember skinning during the busy season, as you know, as young as 14, I was skinning animals.

WHEN DiD YOUR FATHER MiKE SiMPSON RETiRE?

I’m going to tell you, it’s only been about four or five years. He’s in his 70’s now. He slowed down, but he mounted heads all the way up until he was 70 years old. He was in there mounting. Now he didn’t mount what he had mounted before, but he was selectively mounting, but he was mounting away.

WHEN DiD YOU MORE OR LESS TAKEOVER, YOU AND YOUR BROTHERS?

he wanted to know why. Of course, the number one complaint always relates back to the tannery. You know, the taxidermist can literally mount an animal, almost two a day, if it’s a simple whitetail. There’s a little drying time and paint time, and base work but it’s not that long. But as a tannery gets swamped under, well, he can’t get the skins back to us in time.

So regardless on if we could staff up enough with quality taxidermists, we didn’t have the skins. So really it was my brothers and I that came up with having the tannery. And we have purchased a tannery about 20 years ago now. And that’s made all the difference in the world. It’s an onsite tannery. And for a long time, we have had the reputation of a six-month turnaround time. I’m going to tell you that’s half of the industry standards. Industry standard for taxidermy is a year turnaround, 10 to 14 months is what it is. And we, if a client pays the deposit and knows how he wants it mounted and communicates with us, he’s got it in six months. In some cases, less than that. And then there’s specialty cases and ranges that we do it for faster than six months.

Oh, he [dad] was still here. You know, maybe I can tell you probably by the time I was 30, I no longer built anything in the shop. I was in the, I’ve been in the office for the last two, almost two decades, just on the phone with clients, and then still traveling to trophy rooms before and even after. And of course, I do all of the conventions and the PR and all of that, and still organize hunts today. I’m still traveling with groups of hunters as often as I can.

WHAT CHANGES HAVE YOU MADE SiNCE YOU’VE TAKEN OVER NOW?

I had a very smart client tell us one time, ‘What’s the number one complaint of the taxidermy shop?’ And he, of course, he’s complaining about mine at the time, but his observation for all shops, and the number one complaint is turnaround time. And

HOW HAS TECHNOLOGY CHANGED THiNGS iN YOUR iNDUSTRY?

General Manager Barrett Simpson (left) with his father Mike Simpson.

A lot. We’re doing fiber optic star ceilings. We’re doing, instead of the old rainforest cafe style, concrete trees, we’re building synthetic foam trees and foam mountains. We’re definitely doing all of the lighting, accent lighting, LED lighting, and then spotlighting throughout the trophy room. We’re hiding speakers in diorama scenes. And there’s a lot of interactive stuff nowadays.

So yeah, the technology has helped immensely over the years. And then technology with the sculpting, the tanning, and even the mannequins. So the skeletal work for any good taxidermy shop is the mannequins that they’ve purchased. And then for a whitetail I’m going to tell you there’s hundreds upon hundreds of available mannequins to choose from. But for just a handful of mannequins for some of the rare antelopes of Africa. But just like a whitetail, that African antelope comes in all different sizes. Fat ones, tall ones, skinny ones, short ones, squatty. Animals are as diverse as humans are in body types and sizes. So, you really have to be qualified artists. And the mannequins have come a long way, and there are more and more on the market that really help us with that base work to start with.

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY iS PROBABLY THE BiGGEST SURPRiSE PEOPLE HAVE ABOUT WHAT YOU DO OR WHAT CONROE TAXiDERMY DOES?

Well, I’m guessing that people always are surprised when I talk to someone about us, how long we’ve been here, we help you get it [your trophies] in the country, our tannery’s on site. They’re happy with all of that. The turnaround is fabulous. They’re happy we deliver it and install it for you. That seems to be the one that gets more

than any of them. That one usually gets us an, “Oh, you deliver and install?” They love it. Because there’s outside services to do that. And then there’s a lot of taxidermy shops, they’re fabulous artists, but they might not necessarily be great businessmen. I mean, we’re the second largest in the nation basically, by far the largest in Texas as the way of taxidermy shops go. And you can’t do that and just be a great taxidermist setting behind a desk and just mounting heads.

TELL US ABOUT CONROE TAXiDERMY GiViNG BACK TO THE iNDUSTRY AND TO CONSERVATiON.

We always donate to the safari clubs. We volunteer on multiple levels within multiple different clubs, between all three of us. My brothers and I are very active, and that’s where the majority of that conservation comes back. But I would say that Houston Safari Club carries a very special place with all three of us because we grew up in that club. Mike Simpson [Barrett’s father] helped found that club and I’ve never known life without it. I’ve made absolutely every single convention since I was a child. And we’ve all served at different levels. Director, vicepresident, my brother Travis is a director right now. So, I’ve been a volunteer on the convention side for, I don’t know, maybe 30 years. It’s a ridiculously long time. And yeah, giving your time is as important and almost more passionate than giving your money. And I think that giving your time is a great thing to do. And then of course we do all types of other stuff. I mean, we give mounts away to the Wounded Warrior program. You know, we give all kinds of other discounts and work on all types of projects. We have a 400-acre ranch at College Station that was where my father retired to. And we give away hunts - we give away hunts and we give away all types of stuff there. So yeah, you got to give back, especially to something that you’re passionate about. And you know, there’s nothing better than introducing young people to the outdoors. We love doing that. Just make some future hunters and it’s great.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD FOR CONROE TAXiDERMY?

I’m going to tell you that Conroe Taxidermy is concerned for the future of hunting. Our organizations need to reach deeper on the political side to ensure the big game side of hunting. I think always going to be deer hunting, but some people cried over a lion named Cecil, and they closed the importation of lions down right after that. And we have to battle Fish and Wildlife on the permitting side to get particular animals in.

So, I think that the big game hunter loves his lion, his polar bear, and his elephant, just as much as a whitetail hunter loves his whitetail. And there’s no difference. And all of those species are out there and they age and they become old and they die. And there’s nothing wrong with harvesting any of them, a big old whitetail or a big old elephant. But we’re constantly concerned that our way of life will slowly be diminished because it’s a talking point for politicians to stay in power, and Cecil’s proof of that.

And right now today, I have clients that tell me, well, my company doesn’t want me to shoot a lion because of Cecil the lion and how bad it was. And what a horrible thing for a person to be able to do. The legalities for harvesting an African lion are stricter than a whitetail deer. The legalities for shooting a rhinoceros in South Africa is stricter by far than shooting a bear in the United States. ★