Business Has Been Hard
Time for a little bit of vulnerable transparency. Here's what I think is going on - the modern knife market (kitchen knives in particular at least for my case) has been undergoing a bubble, and I think it's popped. A lot of makers have been a really hard time lately and I think there are a few big factors that play into this.
For some background, me and my business have also been having a hard time. I think a lot of people from the outside can tend to think that if someone looks successful, they must be. That just isn't the case a lot of times, because you're only seeing a small window into their operations, and even though I try to be as transparent as possible online, I haven't actually been very social online as much, and then there comes into the fact that reach in social media platforms is not as effective anymore, even amongst followers, and stuff just gets missed. So I am not excluded from this group, my business has been going through tough times in the past few years. Essentially, everything was booming up to and during COVID, interest in knives was skyrocketing as far as makers and consumers, and right afterwards it started going downhill. Sales have been slower and slower, everything has gotten more expensive, social media has rapidly changed over that period, and ultimately I knew that changes needed to be made and there was inevitably going to be a crossover point whether these new changes would work out, or if there was going to be an otherwise very difficult turning point. Unfortunately, that crossover has arrived, I hit my breaking point, and I had to make the really painful decision of letting Sam go.
I don't know what's going to happen after this. I've fought these past years and months as hard as I could, to develop the new Design Series line, to shift my focus in marketing, to build in more consistency and sustainability in the business overall, but the sad reality is that a business has to meet a certain amount of income versus its expenses, and we haven't been meeting that number, and our labor is the most expensive part of all of this. I think there will be a lot of people who will chime in and ask: "Well, did you try this? Have you thought about going that route? What made you think your idea would work? You should have done X, Y, and Z." Yes, I've thought about basically everything out there, and in hindsight there is so much that I could have done, but for a business you have to inform yourself as best you can, make a judgement call, and commit to that decision. I wasn't really in a position to try out a million different things - every decision takes time to develop and manifest, and even if you tried a lot of random things out, it might work for one or two months, but the long-term health of the business has to be taken into consideration; bouncing around a bunch of different things without even a basic business model is a recipe for impending doom.
For a general example, let's say a knife making business has to make $10k a month. That accounts for one's salary, at $5k/mo for the average in the US, and then supplies, materials, rent, utilities, subscriptions for all of the miscellaneous business services of like, interenet, email newsletter, website and domain, social media scheduling app, photo and video editing suite, insurance. It varies for every circumstance, but running with that $10k/mo number, you have a number of options. Do you make two $5,000 knives a month? If you can sell those consistenty, more power to you, but what's a $5,000 knife look like, and can you effectively make two of them in three weeks? I'm taking out one week of the month to average out and allocate to emails, social media/marketing (which is an entirely different job on top of everything else), shop upkeep and maintenance, R&D, and unaccounted setbacks. That can actually be really difficult, not even mentioning trying to market and sell knives of that level, consistently, for all the years to come. Or, on the opposite spectrum, let's say you want to make knives for around $400. Good performing utilitarian knives. Now you have to make and sell 25 of them in one month. That's a lot of work, but doable if you have a whole system established for it, and the virtue of going that route is that you spread everything out so that the spikes of all the ups and downs are not so drastic. But, if you suddenly start churning out 300 knives in a year, do you have the audience to be able to actually move that product right away? It's a completely different market from the $5,000 clientele, or even $1,000. That's what I'm talking about when every decision takes time to develop and play out. Every workshop and workflow is different, and to pivot it takes an extraordinary amount of effort and time to make happen, WHILE trying to run the existing business and still keep that going during which those new changes are taking place.
So yeah, it's been extremely painful lately, I'm by myself in this shop for the first time, ever, because Sam has been with me ever since we started going full-time in 2016. It's going to different, we'll see what happens in the future. I have faith that all of this is going to work out again because I'm still pushing forward, I've learned so much from these hardships, and I think it can grow to be successful and sustainable again to be able to support two, or more, makers.
Why has it been so difficult?
A few different factors come into play here, and there are a lot more, but when I did a quick survey a couple months ago asking makers, vendors, and customers their thoughts, there were a lot of common trends.
It's been insanely overcrowded with new makers in the past few years. I won't break down where everyone came from, but in just the last 5 years the increase in new knife makers has been astronomical. A lot of really good work is being put out! A lot of not-so-great work is also being thrown out there. Regardless, there is this big factor where there simply are a ton of new makers, all fighting to shout louder and get more attention, and most of them are doing it in the same space - in social media, and in knife communities. It's harder to stand out here, and for consumers, it's hard to tell who is who and what is what. There is plenty of room in the world for all of us knife makers, but with us all crammed in one small space, that makes it less than ideal.
COVID, the aftermath, the economy, the world and its events. We had a lot of money getting pumped into peoples hands, a lot of people had more spare time during 2020, food was less easily accessible, and naturally a lot of kitchen knives were being sold like crazy. And then just like how bread exploded in 2020 and fell off after, the same thing happened in the kitchen knife world. Tons of people got into cooking, restaurants opened back up again, and then they realized that cooking was not as big of a hobby for them as they initially thought. Now we're experiencing inflation, and a lot of people just haven't had as much disposable income as before. This is also an election year and it seems like things are on pause until that's settled.
Kind of tying back to the increase of makers, social media itself has been a large driving force of what we're experiencing. Instagram has been huge for marketing, I think a lot of makers built their entire businesses and brands revolving around it, and IG also introduced reels in 2020. Now photos were no longer as effective, it was much harder to get organic growth, and ultimately trying to get the same amount of traction took exponentially more effort and thought; instead of putting out good work for people to see, now you had to come up with new catchy things and stay on top of trends. Now you actually had to invest yourself to paying attention to social media, come up with strategies and tactics, measure your analytics, and become engrossed in this high-speed environment that's constantly changing every day and week; that so easily can become mentally unhealthy. It can be incredibly powerful when it's utilized well, and I've seen accounts grow tremendously in a relatively short amount of time, but feels like it's more feast or famine than before, where you either reap all the rewards or you don't. Even more recently has been this content restriction that we're all facing, where knife accounts are getting restricted because of the content guidelines (knoifes are dangerous weapons), which basically closed us off from the online world.
Has this affected EVERYONE? Not quite to the same extent for everyone, but a large percentage of us have felt those effects. There have been a handful of makers and purveyors who are still very successful and their business is going strong. What's the difference? What have they been doing, that we haven't? Are there things that we can start changing and adopting to turn things around? Yes, but also it's not a straight-forward answer.
By far the most common observation from the makers who are still finding strong success is that they're not relying on any one social media platform. That's not to say they don't use it at all, but they don't put all their eggs into that basket. In general, they've built up their audience the old school way - marketing and finding a strong core following without heavily relying on Instagram or any of the really trendy popular places (please read "1000 True Fans", HIGHLY recommended: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/). As a baseline they also run a solid, effective business that has strong foundation in the all of the important basics - what their actual operating costs are, how much they need to make to actually sustain a business, and how much time and resources go into achieving that target number, rather than just shooting from the hip and hoping for the best (unfortunately it happens a lot, I've been guilty of it). Even knowing only the operating costs and the expenses is so much better than just guessing.
What does that even look like? Well, it can be a number of things. Exhibiting at shows (knife shows AND non-knife shows), finding local communities to network and connect to, doing some basic SEO on your website, having a regular newsletter where you can direct people to, and word of mouth. Of course, these don't look like miracle solutions that will turn something upside down overnight, because they're not, and it takes time to build that. The point is that there is no magical solution, there really never was, and there never will be. Luck is definitely a factor, but in many cases it takes hard work to get lucky.
Herein lies the crux of the issue then. Success is out there, there are potential directions we can take going forward, but none of them are a quick fix. What do we do in the meantime? That I don't know. I am INCREDIBLY fortunate that I have very supportive people in my corner. I've been a contributing member in many different communities - Kitchen Knife Forums, BladeForums, Reddit in its various subs, knife shows, the local Tucson scene, Facebook groups, YouTube, etc. If not for all of you guys that I've met in all of these spaces, this business would have been dead long ago. And even then, business is still hard. I'm working on my YouTube, I'm maintaining (somewhat) on Instagram and Facebook, I stay in touch with everyone in Tucson and support the local cooking competition, and I'm reaching out for new opportunities. So things may be promising going forward, but the right now is what a lot of us are struggling with. Some of the best makers out there are struggling as well.
I'm not here to complain, I'm not here to beg for help, and I'm not even here for advice or anything like that. I wanted to share the thoughts I've gotten from everyone.
What can you guys do to support makers? Of course, purchasing work always is huge and appreciated, but times are tough for a lot of us and that's not always an option. Sharing and posting about work always helps. Talking about it. Spreading the word. Buy a t-shirt and show it off. Send them $5 on 'Buy Me A Coffee', YouTube, or Patreon. Click that like button, write a comment, nudge the algorithm. Message them and tell them they're doing awesome.
