What scares me the most is it seems SK needed the preorder money to buy materials and pay to keep the lights on. What happens when or if too many people ask for refunds? There has to be a point where the ship sinks I would think. I guess I wouldn't want to be one of the last people asking for my money back. Once again, best of luck to those who are financially involved. It sucks for everyone but just imagine if they had grown at a more reasonable speed like Fiddleback...
Ellie and Guy have commented that the Starter campaign was their way of crowd-funding a business loan for the company to help it grow and grow
quickly. They bought new production equipment including the laser-engraver, the blasting-chamber for the peened finish, new grinders, they were working on building the shop... Remember, the Starter Campaign lasted only through April, THEN they used those funds to invest in equipment and also materials:
Here is an Instagram post from July 2015:
https://www.instagram.com/p/4rgd3fpbn2/
Here is another from August 2015:
https://www.instagram.com/p/6SysB0pbvM/
Then the following month is the first batch of GSO-5.1s:
https://www.instagram.com/p/7vkyHipbtM/
Next month, another batch of 5.1s:
https://www.instagram.com/p/8jT66Kpbg4/
There are THOUSANDS of knives right there and a LOT of work to put in... Meanwhile, the 4.7s were already in production as well, and the 2.7s, and.... yeesh, maybe they did grow a bit fast!! They need to invest in
more employees. On top of in-house production tasks, they have the website to operate and their customer-service "division" (formerly Ellie, now her trainee Jordyn).
Keep in mind, the knives are CNC milled elsewhere, but then they are finished in house. I don't know who the current contractor is for the CNC work, blades or handles.
I read that the Fiddleback production line is machined and finished at Larkin Precision (who also makes a lot of knives for other companies:
http://www.larkinprecision.com/services) - they do everything from ordering steel (if the customer so chooses) to finishing the blades. If you think that the Fiddleback knives look a lot like the previous generation of the S!K line, that may be the reason. Nathan Carothers (the Machinist) makes all the handle scales for the production line. Peter's does all the HT.
Fiddleback was smart to move one model at a time, good advice for S!K in the future.
Andy Roy started making knives full-time in 2009, a few years before S!K ever produced one. He has a shop with apprentices and has trained a number of other knife makers, so certainly has skilled employees/professional assistants under his charge. He managed to collect capital and had his first production knife model in February 2015. At Andy's shop, all they have to do is build, sharpen, and ship to their dealers (I assume that they do that, or at least add the signature in-house, I actually have no idea) - no direct sales through their website, and even the "Fiddleback Outpost" website is owned&operated by another company:
http://shbtg.com/index.cfm/blog-news/shbtg-announces-launch-of-fiddleback-outpost/
The Fiddleback production Bushfinger came out February 2015, Hiking Buddy in April, Camp in May, Runt in August, Duke January 2016, Kephart June 2016. Actual production time (purchasing steel, cutting, HTing, handles, finishing, etc.) adds at least 6 months to the timeframe, so we can guess that production started mid-2014 (let's guess August) and
~22 months later we have 6 models available for order form dealers. I don't know how many of each knife have been produced since the beginning, so it's hard to compare... but no pre-orders, right?
Since S!K held their Starter campaign (April 2015), they released the new 5.1 in 3V, 5.1 in 20CV, 4.7 in 20CV, 4.7 in CPM154, 4.7 in CruV, 4.7 in 3V, 2.7 in 20CV, and has just barely started shipping the 4.1s in 20CV and 3V. 8 models, or just 4 if you ignore different steels, produced in
17 months but they struggle mightily to keep up with demand and experienced a significant delay on all the 4.7s.
Look at the difference in time-frame: 6 models in 22 months vs 8 (or 4) in 17 months. Even if you limit S!K's model numbers to 4 (which is a little unfair), their over-all rate of production is
4.25 months per model, while Fiddleback's production line is at
3.67 per model and they do significantly less in-house work on the knives, don't bother much with customer-service matters, and have more experienced production staff in their shop. You see? Fiddleback grew over the course of the last 7-8 years and the production line is new as of 2015. They have more staff than S!K working on their products. S!K was effectively reborn
in 2015 after the move, has a smaller in-house production team but more work to do on the products, hit some major delays on the 4.7s, but the only thing that they cannot keep pace with is
demand.
Keep perspective. S!K is bad at predicting shipping estimates. They hit production delays. And yet they are STILL producing knives at a fairly good clip given their size, production numbers, level of quality, and in-house tasks. The problems people have are that
they already paid for their knife, and so delays on delivery are highly exasperating, particularly if the delivery estimate was
way off at the time of payment and the S!K team is slow to respond to e-mails. But they are still at work, people, and the work continues, and
the demand remains.
Regarding a ship "sinking", there is
too much demand.
Everything that they make sells. Someone asks for a refund, their knife goes back on the market and then sells again. *shrug* The thing is, right now they have assets tied-up in
un-cut steel as well as knives to list as factory seconds (cut, HT'd, and being finished). If stuff stopped selling, there might be an issue and THEN (only then) would the ship be
sold to another company (e.g. Benchmade has been known to buy knife companies) - I don't think it would sink nor would those waiting on a GSO-8 have anything to worry about, but that is pure speculation.
In summary, WHY are people "scared"? There is a demand that the company "turn things around". If they just stop taking money without being able to stick to a delivery estimate, wouldn't that be the end of it? The offering of pre-orders
at all gives the
semblance of
needing to offer pre-orders to stay in business. So why not stop with the pre-orders?
Perhaps because
demand for the option outweighs concerns about delays? Are there any F2nds available on the site right now? If so, how long until they sell-out? *shrug*
I'm not worried, nor am I scared about my investment not coming to fruition. But it certainly is interesting to follow S!K through its growing pains.
