How it all Began

Jager Archery Products, LLC is the product of a poorly organized business plan with a great product! It was started and roughly named after me, Paul Jaeger, while living in Fort Lupton, Colorado. As an avid archer and self-employed plastics guru, I grew frustrated with the quality of grips available around 2005 and started making grips for my own needs. Initially I made grips for compound bows, but soon after starting grip-making I ran into John Magera and rediscovered my love of target recurve.

It was in Louisville and shortly after Coach Lee started coaching in the US that John stopped by my booth. He had a grip on his Best Zenit that he fashioned to conform to the new “BEST Style” method and asked if I could reproduce it for his back up bow. I took it home, cleaned it up, made it pretty and shipped it off to John – and the rest is history. I started to adapt the design to other platforms and Viola! Jager Archery was on the map.

I really do owe a great deal of credit to John for making it possible to grow so quickly. Time passed and John gave my name to a bowyer named David Sosa who crafted a hunting bow that used ILF type limbs. That started me on the path to making stock grips for a number of manufacturers including an eventual introduction to a Michigan bowyer named Jim Belcher.

Jim was working on a 15” ILF riser that needed a grip. I made a one piece grip that fit the riser and he modified it the way he wanted it. That was the first grip I made in a longbow style. A few months later he called me up to say he might have just bought Sky Archery from Matt McPherson at Mathews. Jim hauled all the tooling, machines and documentation used by Earl Hoyt Jr. to make Sky longbows, limbs and risers out to the shop in Michigan. I realized that he was going to need some help with the project so I flew out to help him sort through boxes and perhaps find a logical way to proceed. Who would have guessed that I’d end up packing up all my stuff and moving to Michigan? Jim has taught me many things about building bows and limbs. He even inspired the creation of the BEST Style 2.0 grip based on one of his previous long bow designs.