Pre-order is always nice so one can get in on a knife they want. That being said, full cash up front is an absolutely horrible idea and poor practice. I know CPK has been around, but you will see it many places on BF that you should never pay up front for a knife. I ordered a custom from another maker recently who refused payment until it was done.
Looks like I’ll be missing out on this one for two reasons. You are doing a pre-order a week before Christmas in a year where many are financially strained, and on top of that you want all of the money up front.
This is just my opinion, and I’m sure some flaming will commence.
No flames here. Drama-free zone here. This is the sort of contrary opinion I was looking for. I understand your sentiment and agree with it. I asked the question and had this been the general consensus that would have been the answer.
You're absolutely correct, it's a terrible practice and people shouldn't do it. And I tell new makers never do it. I'm quite the hypocrite.
Like most makers, I started out taking orders. And you get some emails that turn into a 20 message email chain. With orders that change and I'd make mistakes. Or I'd forget people. Or people would ghost. Managing lists is challenging if you're making 40 knives a year, but when you're making thousands it's impossible. I said "screw this I'm not doing it" and starting building what I wanted to make and selling it at 3:00 on Fridays. It got where I wasn't having a lot of problems selling what I was making. Then it got where the sales were so brisk that people were coming to the sales week after week and leaving empty handed and were mad. It was taking the fun out of it. It got where the secondary market on the knives was getting pretty ridiculous which was starting to attract flippers which was making the problem worse.
I had a popular pattern. The original Field knife I think. So, as an experiment I offered to add some people's orders to a run I was starting. With solid orders in hand I ordered
extra steel and
added their orders to my run. It was my first pre-order. Mind you,
I didn't need or want a pre-order. I was having no problem making and selling whatever I wanted to make without pre-orders. This was originally done out of consideration for folks asking for it. And I didn't want to take orders, build the knives and track down the people who'd ordered them. That's fine as a hobbyist but I'm running a business. We are a machine shop with machinists.
Dumb machinists. No customer support people. I'm not good at keeping up with order lists like that. And taking deposits is even worse because now you
have to have multiple transactions. I know lots people do it that way, but I'll bet they're charging more for the work. My goal is high performance big bang-for-the-buck and I need to keep things simple for that to work in the long run. In the goal of keeping things simple I agreed to do pre-orders on the condition that the knife is paid for in advance, I build it, I ship it. Done. No changes, no bullshit. This is a terrible business practice but it is the only way I am willing to take orders outside of my regular Friday sales. Sure, there are plenty of people who don't want to order a knife that way. I get that. I relate. But there are no day-dreamers racking up countless emails either. I love our customers and I want to deliver the best work I can for them at a fair value. But I'm not good at keeping up with a lot of additional complexity and this is the simplest way of taking orders that I know that doesn't put
me out of pocket accommodating other people's preferences.
One advantage beyond taking some of the stress out of the process and some of the steam out of the overly hot sales (look at the boot dagger for an example of this) is it also improves our business. It reduces risk to me undertaking larger runs without getting over extended and has helped our business grow, allowing more patterns and more available inventory for everyone. This is good for me and my family and my customers enjoy the improved variations made possible by the pre-order model and additional inventory keeping the flippers at bay and the product available at a fair price for the people who actually use them. This is different than the makers who use (and abuse) the pre-order concept to get an interest free loan and put risk onto the buyers in order to try to bootstrap themselves into a knife production company.
I own my production capacity. I'm not buying it with money borrowed from a pre-order. And I'm not "new" to this and encumbered with a bad case of the Dunning Kruger effect where I'm going to take everybody's money and then crash in flames, I've been directly involved in manufacturing production since the 90's, I have a college degree, I own an incorporated machine shop with 5 heavy industrial CNC machining centers and some automatic grinders. I'm not the same as the makers who take people's money and then fail to get it all together to deliver. You see that failure again and again and it's almost a running gag in this industry. But we're in a different situation. So, while I acknowledge the gross hypocrisy of saying "don't do this" and then doing it myself, I'm giving people what they want and making it worthwhile to me too.