Wild Captives is piercing archery stereotypes, the Brooklyn way

By Gabe Friedman

Standing in the dark, gray-floored foyer of her large event space, on the second floor of an Industry City building on 34th Street in Sunset Park, Kendall Tichner looks like a chic undercover celebrity.

She sports baggy black pants, a black shirt and a puffy black vest on her very slim frame. Indie pop music plays from a speaker by a couch in the spacious foyer.

“Ok, you ready for a little lesson?” she says, opening the large door that reads Wild Captives in white, sans serif font.

She’s not about to give a dance lesson, or an acting class, or anything else Hollywood-related — she’s an archery teacher.

Inside the loft-like space, she hands over a lightweight bow, a quiver full of plastic arrows and an arm guard.

“You might be bruised in the arm tomorrow,” she says —due to the snapback of the bowstring.

Tichner is the owner and founder of Wild Captives, which claims to be the first woman-owned archery range in the United States. And that’s not the only way Wild Captives separates itself from the pack.

While most archery ranges and gear brands court testosterone, seeking to capitalize on the sport’s ties to hunting and macho culture, Tichner’s goal is to offer archery to people and communities who might feel intimidated by the normal range vibe: queer people, people of color, and especially women.

She points to brands like Bear Archery and PSE, noting how their websites and Instagram pages are “all just men and mountain lions and stuff like that.”

“[Wild Captives] has such a Brooklyn audience because it’s a diverse crowd who you wouldn’t normally see at a gun range or a more masculine-centered archery range,” she tells Brooklyn Magazine.

In a symbolic turn, Tichner took over the Industry City space last year from a branch of an axe-throwing company called Stumpy’s Hatchet House. “They had Blue Lives Matter flags and all these very dated things about men — posters with ‘Tell my wife I’m throwing axes.’ I want to say very stereotypical Americana masculinity was the decor of the space.”

@ktichner Wild Captives: Empowering modern adventurers with lost hands-on skills. ⚔️☁️ . . . #wildcaptives #empowerment #womeninsport #femalefounder #archery #nyc #nycthingstodo #nycstartup #skillsforlife #scouting #urbanadventures #outdoorstartups ♬ original sound – Kendall Tichner

The 7,000-square-foot Wild Captives HQ has since moved across the street to a similar Industry City building. On an off day — it’s only open as of now to the public on weekends — the space has minimalist decor; but during a class, which normally has only a handful of people, the atmosphere shifts to birthday party fun. There’s a ping pong table and a foosball table. Gear available for selfie takers include coats of armor, swords and nunchucks.

“Every single class, we are coming up with new types of games and challenges to add into the intro to archery classes,” says Haulston Mann, a Wild Captives instructor who moonlights as an actor and fight choreographer for films. (He was also preparing for his first excursion to hunt elk this year — with a bow, not a gun.) “There’s a Rubik’s Cube laying somewhere, there are all kinds of little toys. It’s reconnecting with that playful sense that we all have. This provides a space where everybody’s welcome to have a good time and hang out.”

Tichner: ‘Trying to bring these little moments of joy and empowerment’ (Photo by Lauren Buys)

‘Boy scouts for adults’
As one of only a few spaces to shoot a bow in Brooklyn, the company has grown from a pop up idea to one of Time Out New York’s top 100 things to do in the city. A large chunk of Tichner’s profits come from selling the bows she helped design and uses in the space — which are painted sleek red, white and black and come with a starter kit. Sales ebb and flow with holidays and news coverage — including the likes of “The Today Show” and Forbes. She claims that after an influencer made a viral video on TikTok about the Wild Captives bow, she sold $30,000 worth of them in a single day.

But the success is still just blooming, after the brand launched in July 2023. Tichner still doesn’t take much of a salary, for instance, putting all of the earnings back into the company. She eventually wants to turn Wild Captives into a “boy scouts for adults” movement, with sites in cities across the country that help people learn practical and outdoor skills that she says get lost in city life. She hopes to sell other outdoor gear, too, like binoculars and compasses. Picture a hip all-in-one outdoor kit.

“Most people can’t name four birds in their backyards. I think 80 percent of millennials can’t read a map. There are just these wild statistics of how out of touch we are with our direct surroundings,” she says. “I’m literally just trying to bring these little moments of joy and empowerment to people’s daily lives in a way that’s doable and accessible. And so the goal is to give people enough education that they’re more aware and in touch with the urban environment around them, the world around them.”

Fifi Asafo-Adjel, a 31-year-old sign language teacher who lives in the Bronx, saw a news segment about Wild Captives and was “impressed” with how welcomed she felt by Tichner and her team.

“Coming from the Bronx, doing things like archery is sort of very foreign to inner city people,” says Asafo-Adjel, who is Black. “They opened up the session with their vision, their history, what they do currently in their vision, and it just made people feel more comfortable. I know it made me feel comfortable, because I didn’t know how people were going to look at me — like, you know, ‘What is she doing here?’ I didn’t get that vibe at all.”

Going viral
Tichner grew up on Long Island and had always been outdoorsy. But when she hatched the idea for Wild Captives, she was living in L.A. and working as a marketing consultant — and archery was not a part of the original equation. During the pandemic, the “boy scouts for adults” idea got her accepted into UCLA’s Venture Accelerator program, which aids entrepreneurs. Binoculars were going to be the first product.

Around the same time, Tichner got back into posting on her popular TikTok, and her videos involving bows and arrows helped her go viral. Some that showed her throwing balloons in the air and promptly popping them with a shot racked up millions of views, and she now has close to 600,000 followers. She often addressed men “in my comment section” who criticized her form or style. (She claims she is still not an expert, despite her obvious skill on display in the videos.)

Other videos tackle LGBTQ stereotypes, and Tichner, who is gay, says many of her online followers are queer.

@ktichner

Ignore the haters. Do it your way. Wild Captives Archery kit: easy to learn and statistically safer than bowling and golf. #wildcaptives #femalefounder #survivalist

♬ original sound – Kendall Tichner

(By this point, she has enough fans to drown out the haters — including, as she puts it, a segment of “redneck men who support queer people,” and dads with queer children.)

She moved back to New York and tried out an archery pop up experience, and it sold out instantly. The path forward became obvious. She was working in marketing for Industry City when the current Wild Captives space unexpectedly opened up.

“Archery just visually has a lot of virality because of just all of the media surrounding ‘The Hunger Games’ and the apocalypse. And it’s just very visually arresting,” she says. “And it was an industry that seemed like it needed some disrupting.”

She also said she wanted to reclaim archery for women, who have been tied to the sport since, well, the days of the Greek and Roman goddesses Artemis and Diana. Archery was one of the first sports to include women at the Olympics, in 1904, after centuries in which women could participate in the activity while still wearing elegant fashion of the time.

Asafo-Adjel showed up to the Industry City space wearing a dress.

“If they have different types of sports that they want to introduce to the community again, I will sign up for it,” she says.

These days, Tichner’s TikTok is less active as she is busy running all aspects of Wild Captives, where the idea is to eventually open for more days, to institute a lane rental system and even open up a league with teams.

But for now, she’s at least happy that she’s hitting the non-financial goals.

“Everyone who walks in the door, it’s like families, people of color, queer people, all at a shooting range,” she says. “It’s pretty amazing.”