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Legend Biography

Will Primos

2024

Founder of Primos Hunting Calls

Sponsors: Coming Soon

Ask any hunter who makes the best game calls and chances are you’ll hear the name Primos. Will Primos, to be exact. As a 6-year old boy in Jackson, Mississippi in 1958, Will wanted nothing more than to tag along on duck hunts with the older boys in the family. When the day finally arrived, he was hooked on hunting for life. And a legendary journey highlighted by the TRUTH ABOUT HUNTING DVD and TV series helped teach an entire generation to hunt and to become better hunters.

In 1963, at the age of 11, Will crafted his first a duck call after a special day spent hunting in flooded green timber with his Uncle Gus. “Uncle Gus was an expert duck caller, and I was absolutely enthralled hearing him make that call sing. That was my first experience witnessing the magic of mallards cupped up and coming thru the trees. When I got home, I made my own call by copying my uncle’s Jake Gardner call on my Dad’s wood lathe,” said Primos on creation of his first call.

Will continued to hunt through high school and into college with his motto being “Anything that flew, crawled, walked, or swam, I was after it.” Along the way, he tinkered with nearly every tool of hunting he could get his hands on. From duck calls to his own first bow. Iif Will couldn’t buy it, he simply made it.

After graduating from college 1974, Will went to work in the family restaurant business. By then, Will had started turkey hunting. That fall, Will’s life would forever change with a chance meeting of the owner of a local turkey hunting camp. Her name was Eleanor Roessler. Seeing his interest in learning all he could, she showed Will the mouth calls she had made by hand. He went home and started making and perfecting his own mouth calls out of tin beer cans.

By 1976, word of Will’s new mouth calls began to spread. “There was a sporting goods store in town called Hunt and Whittaker,” Primos said. “I was selling my double and triple frame reed mouth calls for $20 a piece.” Before long, Will’s phone started to ring with calls from around the country. It seemed Primos mouth calls were getting a reputation and people wanted to get their hands on them. “Some guy from Pennsylvania came hunting in Mississippi and bought one at the store and took it back with him,” Primos remarked. “He had a store up there and he wanted to carry them. Suddenly, I had a dealer in Pennsylvania.”
Demand for the calls grew and by 1979, Primos Yelpers had grown to a small staff of people making Turkey calls to keep up with demand. Soon after, Will expanded the line to include all things hunting. “If we believed in a product and used it while producing the Primos TRUTH ABOUT HUNTING DVD and TV series then we would build it and offer it to our customers. From the Trigger Sticks, to Game Trail Cameras to, Bowhunting and Gun Hunting Vests we built some incredibly strong hunting products for all us hunters,” Primos commented on the evolution of products getting to the field.

In 1983, Will took his first real step toward marketing his calls with a pioneering idea for the time: instructional audio tapes of actual hunts.
“I worked long hours in the restaurants so I could try and keep growing the hunting business,” Primos said. “We kept growing and growing. I would travel any time I had time off, go promote, go to shows, go give seminars.” The strategy worked. The company reached a million dollars in sales, and still Primos kept working at the restaurants and putting money back into the company and building inventory.

“I just worked with discipline and focused on goals to try and be sure everything was kept going in the right direction. My 1st cousin and hero Jimmy Primos joined with me in 1986 as the Chief Operating Officer and we were off and running!” Primos fondly recalled.

Soon, Primos Yelpers became Primos Hunting with sales rep groups, nationwide distribution and the legendary slogan "Speak The Language". In 1987 THE TRUTH video series was launched and soon became THE TRUTH ABOUT HUNTING on the Outdoor Channel. That same year Primos partnered with Mossy Oak which started a lifelong friendship.

From the incredible people who just loved the outdoors and joined with Will and Jimmy to make Primos the best, to the Prostaff, who were ambassadors for Primos in all 50 states, Primos put together an unbeatable brand whose motto was, “it’s not about us, it's about the customer." The rest, as they say, is history!

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