From a Father’s Old Sketchbook to the Best-Selling Broadhead in the Woods: The Wreck Broadheads Story

When Matt Taget sat down with us for Episode 3 of Hunting Incorporated, he wasn’t just talking about a broadhead company. He was talking about a father-son relationship, a decades-old idea that almost never saw daylight, and a small Michigan operation that decided the only way to build something worth trusting was to build it themselves, in the USA, by hand.

Matt is the co-founder and president of Wreck Broadheads, a family-owned broadhead company he runs alongside his dad out of Michigan. It’s a business built on two things most bowhunters can relate to: a love of the chase, and years of frustration with gear that didn’t hold up when it mattered most.

An Idea That Sat in a Drawer for Decades

Long before Wreck Broadheads existed, Matt’s dad had already designed what he believes was one of the first mechanical broadheads ever conceived. This was back in his early 20s, before expandable broadheads were even on the market. He drew up the whole concept, but he didn’t have the resources or the platform to do anything with it, so the drawings went into a drawer and stayed there.

Decades later, Matt, who had spent time working in outdoor industry video production and marketing, started getting more serious about both bowhunting and the business side of the outdoor world. He went to his dad with a simple pitch: with his dad’s 40-plus years in manufacturing and Matt’s background in marketing, they had the exact skill set needed to design and build their own broadhead. That’s when his dad mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d already tried this once before.

“I don’t think at that point in time we knew how serious we were going to get into it,” Matt said. “It was just kind of, let’s try to build one.” A handful of prototypes later, one design stood out immediately. As Matt put it, it was an “oh crap moment. We really got something here.”

The Problem They Set Out to Fix

Matt and his dad weren’t chasing a gap in the market for the sake of it. They were bowhunters first, and they’d shot plenty of broadheads over the years, some great, some not. The recurring issue they kept running into was durability. Mechanical broadheads, they found, tended to fall apart on bone impact. They held up fine most of the time, but the moment things got hard, they weren’t nearly as tough as a fixed blade.

So that became the mission: build a mechanical broadhead that could take a hit like a fixed blade, manufacture it in the United States, and make every part of it replaceable and rebuildable, all at a price hunters could actually afford. That last part turned out to be the hardest. Competing against overseas manufacturing while maintaining a real dealer program, one where both Wreck and its dealers can make money, has been the toughest part of building the business, according to Matt. But six years in, they’ve built a supply chain of vendors they trust and a dealer program they’re proud of.

Why “Made in the USA” Isn’t Just a Sticker

Wreck Broadheads has deep manufacturing roots. Both of Matt’s grandfathers worked at General Motors, and his dad spent over 40 years in manufacturing. That background shows up in how the company operates today. Wreck runs a small prototype shop in-house where every design is hand-built and tested, and while mass manufacturing happens with a trusted partner about 90 minutes from their facility, every single broadhead is assembled, inspected, and laser-etched in-house before it ships.

“We put hands on every broadhead that ships out,” Matt said. That’s a direct response to a problem he’s heard about constantly in the industry: brand-new broadheads arriving with loose parts or blades that fall off because they were mass-assembled overseas with no quality check on the other end.

A Small Team, On Purpose

Wreck Broadheads runs lean. Matt and his dad are hands-on every single day. His mom handles bookkeeping and shipping. There’s a marketing and pro staff coordinator, and one part-time employee who helps with assembly. That’s the whole operation.

Matt is candid that keeping the team small means everyone wears multiple hats, especially during the fall build-up season, but he sees it as a feature, not a limitation. With fewer people involved, quality control stays tight from manufacturing all the way through to customer service. If a customer has an issue, Matt or his dad can get back to them the same day, something he says gets harder to promise as companies scale and add layers of people between the product and the customer.

That accessibility matters more than it might seem. As Matt pointed out, when a hunter draws back on an animal, they’re trusting that broadhead completely. Being a small, visible, answer-the-phone kind of company is part of how Wreck earns and keeps that trust.

The Five-Year Plan That Turned Into a Fifteen-Year Plan

When Matt and his dad started, they weren’t expecting to be where they are today. The original plan was simple: build a website, sell online, and see what happened. That plan got tested immediately since Wreck’s public launch landed in 2020, right as trade shows and in-person dealer meetings became impossible. So for the first two years, Wreck sold exclusively online.

They’d given themselves a five-year plan going in. By year two, dealers were reaching out wanting to carry the product in stores, which meant reworking the whole go-to-market approach on the fly. Last year marked the company’s biggest growth year yet, and Matt says they’re now planning in ten and fifteen-year horizons rather than five. The strategy going forward isn’t a pivot. It’s more of what’s already working: expanding the broadhead lineup based directly on what customers are asking for.

It was also right around that five-year mark that both Matt and his dad went full-time with the business, with his dad retiring from his previous career to focus on Wreck full time.

Inside the Product Line

Wreck currently runs three core broadheads:

The HXP2 and XP2 are both two-blade expandables with a 2.25-inch and 1-7/8-inch cut respectively. Both use blades that are 40,000ths of an inch thick, noticeably heavier than most competitors, with a chisel tip built to split bone rather than fold on impact.

The FX4 is a four-blade fixed head with a 1.375-inch main blade and a 3/4-inch bleeder, designed to fly with field-point accuracy straight out of the package.

What sets the mechanical line apart structurally is simplicity. There are only five parts total in the mechanical broadhead: no springs, no bands, no collars. Every part, blades, tips, and all, is replaceable, which means a single broadhead can be rebuilt indefinitely rather than replaced.

The newest version, the HXP2, introduced a completely collarless design last year, using dimpled blades and friction to hold everything closed instead of a mechanical collar or spring retainer. Matt called it “probably the best thing we’ve ever done for this company,” solving a common complaint in the mechanical broadhead category where blades can pop open unintentionally in a quiver.

What’s Next: Titanium and a Hybrid Blade

Two projects are in development. First is a titanium series aimed at crossbow hunters, since today’s fastest crossbows are pushing speeds over 500 feet per second, which is faster than Wreck’s current aluminum ferrules are rated for (450 fps). At those speeds, the risk isn’t necessarily in-flight deployment, since Wreck’s heads are tested not to open in flight, but rather ferrule durability on a hard bone hit or a bad shot placement.

Second is a three-blade mechanical or hybrid design, something customers have been requesting directly. Neither is slated to launch this year, but both are in active field testing, which Matt describes as an intensive, non-negotiable step before anything reaches the market. “We’re out in the woods shooting tons and tons of animals with these things,” he said, testing every product against the standard of what he’d personally want flying at the deer of a lifetime.

The Advice That Stuck

Asked what he’d tell someone sitting on a business idea, or what he’d tell himself six years ago, Matt didn’t hesitate: just start. He pointed out that most people have an idea, sometimes several, but very few actually act on one. Social media tends to glamorize entrepreneurship, he said, when in reality it’s stressful, unglamorous work with no guarantees. His take: it’s genuinely hard to fail if you simply refuse to quit.

On staying grounded day to day, Matt talked about not letting big wins turn into extended celebrations, and not letting rough days spiral either. Staying active, reading, and keeping a level head through the highs and lows of running a business has been as important to him as any product decision.

The Bottom Line

Six years after a father’s shelved sketch turned into a real conversation, Wreck Broadheads has grown from an online-only startup into a company with a genuine dealer network, a loyal customer base, and a reputation for durability built the hard way, through bone-splitting field tests and a refusal to cut corners on manufacturing. It’s a family business in the truest sense, small by design, answer-the-phone accessible, and still run by the same two guys who decided a few years back that they could build something better.

You can find the full broadhead lineup, including the HXP2, XP2, and FX4, at recbroadheads.com.