According to John Burgeson, president of Wildlife Research Center, the company can trace its genus back to a time when they were just trying to earn money—one dime at a time.

“Back when we were kids my dad would pay my brother and I 10 cents for each mouse we could catch. At first we just used cheese. It seemed to work well enough in the cartoons and we really didn’t know any better. It didn’t us long to realize our mice were not so fond of cheese, though. We learned pretty quickly that if we wanted to be successful, we were going to have to do some experimenting on our own. Just because a piece of knowledge was though to be common, didn’t make it right.”

It seems mice can only hold a young boys attention for so long. John and his brother, Brian, eventually ventured out into the woods and began trapping muskrats and other small game. “We took our lessons from the mice and started applying them to other species. We just loved trying different smells and seeing what really worked and what didn’t,” John remembered.

“We read every magazine on trapping we could get our hands on and ordered a fair number of scent and lure products from them too. We were never quite satisfied with just trying something out of the box or bottle. We were always mixing products and adding ingredients just to see if we could make something better,” John recalled.

Later during their college days, the two brothers had a tree service to help pay the bills. We still loved hunting and trapping though. In fact, we never really quit doing that kind of stuff. Even before I ever started deer hunting, I would set up scents and send my dad and his buddies out with them to see if they worked. I guess I was always just into trying that kind of stuff,” John chuckled.

“Eventually we developed Wildlife Research and in 1983 went with our first product. After the years of trying different things we had a deer formula that really worked—we introduced it under the name Trail’s End #307,” John explained.

The early days were more than just lean. Wildlife Research spent something in the neighborhood of $10,000 during its first year in advertising, which resulted in sales of something closer to $1,000. “From a business standpoint we weren’t a success right away. However, we started working the shows and managed to sell a few more bottles. Then we got some of our product in some smaller stores. Most of the time we had to give them the stuff on consignment just to get them to carry it because they did not know how well it worked,” John said.

He continued, “We really considered it a major milestone when we got our first salesman. He drove a truck on a beer route and we convinced him to carry a few cases of our lure and paid him a commission for everything he sold while making his deliveries.”

John measures WRC’s first real success when he came up with the idea for the Ultimate Scrape Dripper. Scent dispersal systems were simple metering devices back in those days and tended to waste a lot of product. The market was ripe for a better solution. “The Ultimate Scrape Dripper idea came to me when I noticed a soap dispenser that would leak after the steam from my bathwater heated up the air inside the pump dispenser. I took the idea back to the shop and started running tests. It was that daytime scent dispenser that made the bigger stores take notice; they wanted it. And when they bought the dispenser, it was an easy sale to include most of the other scent products we had developed over the years,” John recalled.

Today, Wildlife Research Center offers a host of scent and scent elimination products and for 2012 it has sought to take several of its most-popular products and infuse more value and performance into each one.

Scent Killer Gold Scent Eliminator Scent elimination isn’t new for the hunting community or for WRC, but how Scent Killer Gold works is. “With Scent Killer Gold we sought out a way for the product to be even more effective after it dries. This way, a hunter can pretreat his or her clothes before they go into the field. And when they put them on in the field, the clothes are already dry. This can be huge in area where the temperature is particularly cold,” according to John. Scent Killer gold will be offered in both 12- and 24-ounce bottles.

Scent Killer Gold Body Wash “Scent killer Gold Body Wash is an upgrade we to our current body wash. We liked how the old formula worked, but with a few tweaks, we found ways to super-charge it even more,” John stated.

Scent Killer Gold Laundry Detergent With the expansion of high-efficiency washing machines in the market we felt we needed a product designed to work in them. The result was Scent Killer Gold Detergent. Beyond working really, really well, it only uses about half as much to do a load of laundry, making it a great value for the consumer as well,” John enthused.

Golden Scrape Last, but by no means least for 2012 is WRC’s new scent lure Golden Scrape. “Currently, we are offering our Active Scrape product and it works fantastic. In fact, it’s probably the best-selling scrape product on the market today. With that in mind, we have set the bar pretty high for Golden Scrape. Golden Scrape will be just a bit more premium, with a couple of extra little tweaks that is really going to get the bucks fired up,” John concluded.

Contact: (800) 873-5873; www.wildlife.com