Self-Service Customer Portal and Automated Updates Eliminate ‘Where’s My Mount?’ Calls, Freeing Artists to Focus on Craft
LOS ANGELES — In taxidermy shops across America, one question dominates daily life. It arrives by phone, text, email, and unannounced weekend visitors: “Where’s my mount?”
Customers drop off a deer, elk, bass, or duck and wait months with no updates. They wonder if work has begun, if the project sits half-finished, or if their specimen remains buried in a freezer. The uncertainty leads to repeated inquiries, shared frustrations at hunting camps, and damaged reputations.
For taxidermists, these status calls create a vicious cycle. Each inquiry consumes 5 to 15 minutes. In a shop managing 200 active projects, the interruptions accumulate into hours lost every day, hours that should go toward actual mounting, tanning, and finishing. The backlog grows, wait times extend, and more calls follow.
MountChief (https://mountchief.com) ends this cycle.
MountChief is the first taxidermy-specific shop management software, built to give customers real-time, self-service visibility into their projects without requiring taxidermist intervention. At intake, every specimen receives a QR code. Each stage of the process receives photo documentation and timestamps. Every transition automatically notifies the customer.
A hunter who delivered a whitetail cape in November can, in February, open the MountChief portal on their phone and view the current status, intake photos, tanning start date, upcoming form fitting schedule, and more, all without the shop owner responding to a single message.
Early adopters report dramatic improvements: intake processing three times faster than paper forms, near-complete elimination of status inquiry calls, and customer satisfaction levels previously rare in an industry where 12-month turnarounds remain common.
“Taxidermists are among the most talented artists you will ever meet,” said founder Ryan Mercer. “They transform a raw cape and form into lifelike art that stops people in their tracks. Yet many run the business side like it is still 1995, relying on whiteboards, paper logs, and memory. MountChief leaves their craft untouched. It simply removes the administrative burden so they can focus on the work that matters.”
The platform manages the complete taxidermy lifecycle:
- Digital intake captures species details, customer preferences, pose options, and reference photos in structured, trackable format.
- Job scheduling handles dozens or hundreds of simultaneous projects with priority flags and deadline monitoring.
- Photo documentation at every stage builds a visual record that protects both shop and client.
- Automated progress updates deliver professional, timely notifications at each milestone, complete with photos when applicable, eliminating manual messaging.
MountChief (https://mountchief.com) offers a growing suite of free tools, including pricing calculators, turnaround time estimators, and intake form builders, accessible to any taxidermist without registration. The materials section provides in-depth references on tanning agents, forms, adhesives, and finishing products. A library of industry guides addresses pricing strategies, workflow optimization, and more for shops of all sizes.
Designed for full-service studios, bird and fish specialists, European skull mount operations, and high-volume commercial shops, MountChief is now live and serving taxidermists nationwide.
About MountChief
MountChief is the purpose-built management platform for taxidermy professionals, delivering automated customer communication, self-service tracking, photo documentation, and streamlined operations to reduce interruptions and improve satisfaction for artists and clients alike. The era of endless “where’s my mount?” calls are ending. For shops on MountChief, it has already ended.
For more information, visit https://mountchief.com.
