Is 6.5 Grendel holding its own?

[middle man]

I think one of the biggest issues manufacturers have to deal with is diversification in the market. With AR15's, the primary demand is of course .224" barrels, so brand name companies who assemble and market parts guns with their names roll-marked on the lowers are dealing in volume. The big names like Bushmaster, DPMS, RRA, and Stag deal directly with distributors, namely Ellett Brothers, Accusport, and RSR Group.

Those distributors will order in volume based on demand or minimum order requirements they push onto retail FFL's, where Joe Blow and Jane Crow shop. The old model of manufacturer-distributor-retailer-customer has been given a vigorous upset in the e-commerce age, where online distributors (usually click & mortar FFL's) have realized that they can do four online sales for every physical walk-in customer.

The modularity of the AR15 even adds more upset to the traditional firearms retail market scheme, since there are minimal "barriers to entry" for the end consumer, who can simply part a gun together at his/her own pace, rather than being stuck with a large price tag for one purchase.

With the Grendel, you can't just throw parts together and expect the gun to function reliably right off the bat, because it is at the threshold of what is capable of being harnessed in the AR15 receiver set and barrel extension, so tolerances, materials strength, sourcing, testing, and a rigid QC is very important, much more so than the cobbled .223 plinker without a single Mil-Standard part in it, which is intended for the consumer who wants minimal price, but something that looks like an AR15 to maybe shoot a couple of times a year in a very low volume shooting schedule.

To manufacture critical Grendel parts (barrels, bolts, and magazines), one has to be competent and dedicated to very high standards of QC, which pretty much everybody in the market claims, yet very few practice. Take Hesse/Vulcan Arms as an example.

I'm the "MSR product specialist" for a national firearms distributor...Grendel is growing, yet remains very niche. Hornady only started producing the factory loaded ammo in late 2012, then the hyper market hit and derailed everyone's carefully laid merchandising plans for 2013. Visiting a dealer recently, I found Lapua Grendel brass in stock. The market is very much normalizing and manufacturers are thinking about niche products again.

What major manufacturer would you like to see a 6.5 Grendel from?