How do you decide which knives or projects your going to work on? I think the demand for a kitchen knife would be high but you only have it around 25% for it being produced. Is it how many you can sell?, profit per piece, which seem the most fun or challenging? Or something else altogether?
It's a combination of factors. Am I interested in it, is there demand for it, and is it well suited to our process and the materials I like to use.
I've built my brand on offering good bang for the buck. This is a good approach to
anything.
There are different markets you can serve. You can offer the cheapest and there will be people who buy that. You can offer "middle of the road" and that's a very popular segment to be in but it's also a very crowded place to be. And you can offer
the best, because there will always be people who want
the best of something. It might not be immediately obvious when you look at our humble looking work, but this is the route I decided to take. I honestly believe we make the best knives of their sort to be had anywhere. But it's the "best" as I define it to myself. I'm not very concerned about a great deal of attention to superfluous detail such as perfect symmetry and perfect fit and finish and beautiful flow and artistic design in knives. I think it's frivolous. This is ironic because there are many people who fuss about these things that have become good and regular customers of our brand because our work often exhibits these things (because we're competent at what we do), but my focus has
always been on performance and it's my humble opinion that we're among the very best at what we do. My sub-niche of offering "the best" is to exclude expensive details such as fine finishes and fancy woods and inlays that drive up the costs of high end knives without adding any performance value and to focus on having the best metallurgy, geometry and ergonomics to be had, and at a price that justifies
using the work. And don't get me wrong, we're not cheap. Most people would consider our work to be very expensive (it is) but counterintuitively I also consider it to be a very good value. A good example of this where the rubber meets the road are our competition cutters. We win almost every race we go to and I believe that part of this (in addition to how awesome Jo and Ben are as cutters) is that our knives are (in my opinion) the best in the industry. But they're also about the most affordable serious competition cutter to be had in that arena. <--- that's bang for the buck. I also think the K18 would have absolutely
kicked ass in KOD and $1,500 for a real sword with its performance and combination of attributes is bananas.
And this is why I don't make kitchen knives. You can get a pretty decent kitchen knife for $150. I'm not a subject mater expert and due to the ubiquity of kitchen knives used daily in so many kitchens around the world the designs are very well worked out and refined. My design and my metallurgical background in high performance alloys that have a magical ability to stay sharp and tolerate rough use is moot in a kitchen knife. As a rule you're not wailing on them or cutting hard or abrasive food. The potato knife doesn't play to our strengths, so it's not worth what I would need to sell it for to justify making them. I know there are plenty of people willing to drop $250 for our potato knife but I don't want to do that because I don't feel the knife justifies that price.
