One Brother’s Fall, One Harness, and the Company That Changed Treestand Safety Forever: The Hunter Safety System Story

For the very first episode of Hunting Incorporated, host Sean Furbrush sat down with Jerry Widner, co-founder and president of Hunter Safety System. It’s a fitting place to start a show built around the people behind the brands hunters trust in the field, because few products have changed hunting safety culture as much as the one Jerry and his brother John built out of a near-tragedy in the Alabama woods.

Hunter Safety System didn’t start as a business idea. It started as two brothers trying to keep each other alive.

This conversation is part of our ongoing series digging into the people behind the gear hunters trust every season. You can catch every conversation on the Hunting Incorporated hub.

The Morning That Changed Everything

In the year 2000, Jerry and his brother John were hunting climbing stands in South Alabama. They split up that morning, and not long after Jerry settled into his stand, his two-way radio crackled with John’s voice: “I’m in trouble. I need help. Bring your stand and hurry.”

Jerry climbed down and ran to find that the base of John’s climbing stand had fallen away while John was still on it. As he fell, John managed to grab the tree with one hand and hang on until Jerry arrived. Both men were exhausted and shaken. Lying on the ground trying to catch his breath, Jerry asked his brother the obvious question: “John, why weren’t you wearing your harness?”

John’s answer stopped him cold: “Were you wearing yours?”

Neither of them had been. Both owned harnesses. Both had tried to put them on that morning, gotten frustrated when the straps went on backwards or inside out, and climbed without them, the way they’d done many times before. That night, back at the camper, they designed what would eventually become the Hunter Safety System harness, not to start a company, but to remove their own excuses for skipping safety gear that was confusing and unpleasant to wear.

Solving Their Own Problems First

Every early design decision came from frustrations Jerry and John had lived with themselves. Traditional harnesses were confusing and time-consuming to put on, so they redesigned theirs as a vest you could simply slip into. Weave-through buckles created dangling straps that became trip hazards while climbing, so they engineered a way around that entirely and eventually patented the process. Harness straps covered pants pockets they relied on in the field, so they built pockets directly into the vest. And because they hunted both bow and gun seasons, they made the vest reversible: camouflage on one side, blaze orange on the other.

The first three harnesses they ever built were for Jerry, John, and their hunting partner Jim Barta. There was no plan to sell anything. But other hunters started noticing the vests, most memorably when Jerry and John would run into a restaurant between hunts, still wearing their harnesses, and other hunters at nearby tables would ask what in the world was strapped to their backs.

From Side Project to Cabela’s Order

That word-of-mouth curiosity is what eventually led Jerry and John to build one more harness, seal it in a five-cent plastic bag with a handwritten note that said, essentially, “if you like what you see, call me,” and mail it to Cabela’s with no buyer name, no department, and no contact on file. Two weeks later, a buyer from Cabela’s called, intrigued enough to ask a simple question: could they fill an order?

The buyer asked for 500 units. Jerry and John had built five harnesses total at that point. They ran the math, realized it would cost roughly $30,000 to produce, and walked into a bank with nothing but a phone call to show for it. The loan officer asked for a purchase order on Cabela’s letterhead before he’d approve the loan, so Jerry called Cabela’s back, got the purchase order, secured the funding, and built the run.

Then came the packaging problem nobody had planned for. A local supplier offered them a stack of discounted, flattened-out overrun boxes for free, no delivery included. Jerry and John hauled them back, packed ten harnesses per box, and shipped 50 boxes to Cabela’s. Two weeks later, Cabela’s called again, confused: they hadn’t received any harnesses. What they had received, and had been quietly wondering about, was an unexplained shipment of Dell computer boxes. Jerry and John had shipped their entire order in recycled PC packaging. Cabela’s got the joke, the order got sorted out, and the harnesses inside those boxes went on to become two more reorders of 500 units that same year, some of them shipped in the same reused computer boxes, turned inside out.

Five Years, No Paycheck

Jerry was an insurance agent and John worked at General Motors when all of this started, and neither had any background in running a company. What changed their trajectory wasn’t a single big break, but a statistic Jerry read while trying to educate himself on small business survival: roughly 96% of startups fail within their first five years, often because founders try to live off the new business too soon.

So Jerry and John made a deliberate choice. They kept their day jobs for five full years and never took a paycheck out of Hunter Safety System during that stretch, letting the company grow on its own revenue while they worked two full-time jobs simultaneously. It wasn’t until year five, once they’d worked through their own pricing mistakes and operational blind spots, that they felt confident stepping away from their regular careers to run Hunter Safety System full time.

Jerry’s background in insurance also meant he understood risk long before Hunter Safety System existed. If you lease hunting ground and want that same kind of protection for your own investment, AHLA’s hunting lease insurance is built with hunters in mind.

Faith, Team, and a Company Built to Last

Jerry is candid that he never set out to build a business, and he credits the entire venture, including the decision to build a harness in the first place, to what he describes as a clear message from God delivered through his brother’s near-fatal fall. That conviction has shaped how the company operates day to day: Jerry describes dedicating the business to God early on and leaning on prayer at every major crossroads.

That same intentionality shows up in how Hunter Safety System has built its team. With just 14 employees, many of whom have stayed with the company for more than a decade, Jerry points to Jim Collins’ Good to Great and its metaphor of getting the right people on the bus as a guiding principle. Finding those people from a small, rural town in Alabama hasn’t been simple, but Jerry credits much of the company’s staying power to having built a team that genuinely cares about the mission.

Why the Letters Matter

Hunter Safety System has received well over 600 letters from hunters who credit the company’s products with saving their lives after a fall. Jerry keeps every one and makes sure the entire team, warehouse and office alike, sees each letter as it comes in. It’s a deliberate reminder of what’s at stake in a category Jerry describes as inherently hard to sell: safety gear isn’t glamorous, but it’s the product category where quality can’t be compromised.

That philosophy is why Hunter Safety System has never positioned itself as the cheapest option on the shelf. As Jerry put it, if you’re buying a parachute, price shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

The Lifeline: Closing the Real Safety Gap

One of the most consequential product decisions at Hunter Safety System came from a statistic, not a design sketch. The late LJ Smith, who investigated treestand accidents for years, found that 86% of treestand falls happen when the hunter is not actually in the treestand, but climbing up or down. That number told Jerry his harness alone wasn’t solving the whole problem, since it was designed to be clipped to the tree only once a hunter reached the stand.

The result was the Lifeline: a lightweight, affordable climbing rope with a loop anchored above the stand and a prusik knot that lets a hunter move freely up and down the tree while staying continuously connected from the moment their feet leave the ground until they’re back on it. Paired with a harness, Jerry says it closes the safety gap entirely. As he puts it, if it’s installed and connected properly, you cannot fall.

A Message Beyond the Product: TSSA

Jerry and Sean are both founding members of the Treestand Safety Awareness Foundation (TSSA), now in its eleventh year. TSSA doesn’t manufacture or test products; its role is purely educational, spreading a simple safety message built around the ABCs of treestand safety: Always inspect your equipment, Buckle up before you climb, and Connect and stay connected the entire time. The foundation now works alongside groups like the Treestand Manufacturers Association and the International Hunter Education Association to give hunters and their families a clear, consistent safety message across the industry.

Advice for Anyone Sitting on an Idea

Asked what running Hunter Safety System has taught him, Jerry pointed first to his faith, describing the business as something he was called to build rather than something he set out to create. His practical advice for anyone with an idea but no clear path forward: stop treating challenges as reasons to quit and start treating them as the next problem to solve. That mindset, working backward from a hunter’s stated frustration to an actual fix, is the same process that produced the Lifeline, and it’s still how the company develops new products today.

The Bottom Line

What began as two brothers trying to remove their own excuses for skipping a harness has grown into a company credited with reshaping treestand safety culture across the hunting industry, backed by hundreds of letters from hunters who are alive because of it. Hunter Safety System’s story is a reminder that some of the most important businesses aren’t built to chase a market opportunity. They’re built to solve a problem the founders couldn’t ignore.

You can find the full line of harnesses and the Lifeline at huntersafetysystem.com.

For more founder stories like this one, visit the Hunting Incorporated hub.