There’s a version of this story that reads like a press release and ends with a groundbreaking ceremony and a ribbon cutting. There is another version that gets at what is actually happening in Hickory, North Carolina, and why a small Italian-American gunstock company laying down more square footage matters in a way that goes well beyond gunstocks.
WOOX announced this month that it will break ground on an expansion of its Hickory manufacturing facility, with completion targeted for the end of 2026. Not only new buildings, but new hires and more capacity for the company’s American walnut and laminate-series stocks and chassis, which are the products that have outrun WOOX’s existing footprint. That’s the headline.
The longer story is about a town. Hickory, for most of the 20th century, was the furniture capital of America. At its peak, the woodworking trade in and around the city employed tens of thousands of skilled craftsmen across North Carolina. Then the 1990s arrived, followed by the 2000s. Production moved overseas, mostly to China, and what had been a generations-deep tradition of hand-finishing and shaping wood for a living got hollowed out in less than a decade. Family workshops closed and apprenticeships disappeared. The kind of practical knowledge that does not live in a textbook and only transfers through years of standing next to someone who already knows how went with them.
WOOX, which was founded by the Minelli family in the mountain valleys of Bergamo, Italy, in 1937, decided several years ago that the answer to building premium gunstocks in America was to plant them somewhere that already understood wood. Hickory was the obvious choice. The craftsmen the company has hired and trained in North Carolina learned their technique directly from the same Italian family that has been refining it for 88 years. That’s not a marketing line. It’s how the company actually operates.
The product side of the story is its own thing. WOOX builds stocks and chassis for many popular rifle and shotgun platforms in circulation, including the Remington 700, Savage 110, Weatherby Vanguard, CZ 457 and Ruger 10/22, plus the AR-15 and AR-10 families. The construction blends American walnut with carbon-reinforced nylon and precision metalwork, which is how the company hits both the classical aesthetics that traditional riflemen want and the modularity that competition shooters need.
Every stock is shaped from an individually selected blank. WOOX does not use molds. Roughly one out of every 25 walnut blanks the company examines meets its standard for grain, figure, density and structural integrity. The rest become something other than a WOOX stock. From there, each piece is hand-finished by the team in Hickory using the same technique the Minelli family has been refining since 1937. The carbon-reinforced chassis inserts mean the barreled action drops in without bedding or pillars, and customers regularly report that their rifles shoot better after the upgrade than they did before.
What WOOX is building in Hickory is bigger than a manufacturing footprint. It is an attempt to reconstitute a craft tradition that the American economy decided in the 1990s it could afford to lose.
