Originally a customer of the holster company located in Zanesville’s backyard, Scott Frank has transformed a hobby into a nationally known company.

Located at 973 Alfred St., the operation of 3i Holsters is tucked behind some homes between downtown and South Zanesville.

In 2016, Frank, the current owner of 3i Holsters, bought the company from a school teacher who was going to shut the business down as it was becoming too much to take on as a side hobby. After learning the operations for about six months, Frank took the business on full-time.

Prior to being a business owner, Frank was a semi-truck driver.

“I’m working 90 hours a week to keep from having to drive a truck,” Frank said.

A former machine gunner with the Marine Corps, Frank grew up around guns, a hobby that he has passed on to his children.

“I’ve grown up around guns, I’ve hunted all my life, all that good stuff. I taught CCW classes for about three years,” Frank said. “My son actually started getting interested in the competition, pistol competition, when he was 12. So, he started that and, in all honesty, he’s probably the one that drug me in deeper.”

While guns are the immediate thought when it comes to holsters, 3i Holsters doesn’t limit its business to just working with guns.

From Taser holsters for the South Zanesville Police Department to K-9 E-collar holsters for the Muskingum County Sheriff’s Office to tourniquet holsters, Frank is always developing new products for his customers.

“Basically, if it’ll fit in my press, I can probably make a holster for it,” Frank said. “A lot of Kydex companies say that they’re custom until you actually ask for a special request and well (they say) we don’t do that, we don’t say no. … We do knives, flashlights, you know, mag carriers, if we can fit it in, we’ll do it.”

At 3i Holsters, Frank and his small team have about 80 different, basic gun molds to make holsters from, but orders are not limited to just the molds.

Customers come in daily with new ideas and projects for Frank to take on. While not every idea works out, many of his products that go beyond a basic holster are based off customer need.

Frank prides his work on being truly custom, which he said, not all shops offer.

“When it comes to what we’re working on adding, it’s listening to our customers and what they want,” Frank said. “If one customer wants it, then another one does, so we try to make, build, something around their idea and kind of go from there. Most of what I do is based on customer feedback.”

With new ideas consistently arising, while also filling orders and running his shop, Frank said he usually sits down to work on projects around 9 p.m.

After talking to law enforcement, EMTs, military personnel and others, it took Frank about one month, and multiple tries, to come up with a tourniquet holster that solved the normal issues presented by other holsters.

That holster is not an exception to the amount of work and troubleshooting that goes into Frank’s products. As a father of two competition shooters, having top-of-the-line holsters for competition shooting was a must.

“The competition holsters, I actually had competitive shooters sit down with me, we designed that holster around what they needed it to do,” Frank said.

3i Holsters has 14 sponsored USPSA shooters scattered across the county, the youngest of those competitive shooters being 11 years-old.

Having sponsored shooters represent 3i Holsters is a newer endeavor Frank has taken on since buying the business. There have been many challenges to building up his business since 2016, one of the main struggles being that there is a lot of competition 3i Holsters is up against.

“There’s guys doing this in their garage … there’s guys doing this in their kitchens,” Frank said. “Our biggest challenge is there’s a lot of different holster, Kydex holster, companies out there, and, without beating up on them, we have worked tirelessly trying to make a better product.”

With so many other companies doing similar work, Frank prides his company on the quality of product he and his team produce.

Many holsters are designed in a way that allows the material to touch portions of the gun. With that design, many guns are scratched by pulling it out of the holster.

Unlike many other holsters, Frank’s products don’t touch much of the gun. Rather, he uses adjustable retention which minimizes holster wear on a gun.

“It’s not all about the looks, it’s about the function, how they work, whether they’re going to scratch your gun up or not,” Frank said. “Mine do not scratch guns up. We have our own process that just gives you a nice, clean withdraw with good retention, and it’s not tearing your equipment up.”

Although there have been many challenges with taking on the business, Frank said the positives far outweigh the troubles.

“I get to wake up in the morning and play with guns all day. And, actually, the best part is my customers,” Frank said. “I know this sounds cliché, but I’ve got some of the best customers. They’re loyal, they are constantly helping us bring in more customers, it’s just insane.”

Many of 3i Holster’s customers are not one-time customers as a large portion of customers come back time and time again.

“We actually joke with our customers that they can’t just have one ’cause most of our customers are coming back for multiples,” Frank said. “We’ve actually got one customer that has 20 of our holsters, and he doesn’t own 20 pistols. He actually has multiple holsters for the same guns depending on what he wants to wear that day.”

With his customers fueling his work, Frank has found many ways to give back to the communities he serves in the best way he knows how.

Frank has designed two fundraiser holsters in support of law enforcement.

“We’ve done a fundraiser holster for Houston PD after the hurricanes,” said Frank. “All the cops in Houston had to stay when the hurricane was hitting, and, while their houses were getting demolished, they were out working and letting their houses get trashed while everybody else was saving their own.”

The fundraiser is still currently running in support of the Houston Police Department. With each holster purchase, 20 percent of the profit goes toward the nonprofit organization in Houston supporting the law enforcement officers.

The second fundraiser holster was a memorial holster in honor of the two law enforcement officers in Westerville who died in the line of duty last year. 3i Holsters partnered with L.E.P.D. in Columbus for the sale of the memorial holsters which raised about $2,000 for the families of those two officers.

L.E.P.D. Firearms and Range in Columbus is one of 28 retailers that sells 3i Holster products. More local retailers include Heritage Trading Post in South Zanesville, FMJ indoor range in Cambridge, the Bullet Ranch in Pataskala and a display at Briar Rabbit in Zanesville.

For more information about 3i Holsters and to view its products, visit the website here.

3i Holsters is Y-City New’s business spotlight for the month of January.

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