Crowdfunded Spyderco?

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Gadgetman7

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Sep 30, 2001
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I noticed that DPX has crowdfunded a knife on Kickstarter. Perhaps this might work for some of the Spyderco designs that may only have niche appeal. For example, runs of discontinued knives or prototypes that may only be interesting to collectors. Would you support a crowdfunded Spyderco knife?
 
Can you provide a link to the Dpx kickstarter?

Honestly, I never fully understood the concept of crowdfunding. As in, you give the company money to launch and they typically give you some form of chotchkey...

For an established company (like spyderco) this makes even less sense especailly given the reputational considerations of failure.
 
I think crowd funding an exclusive or sprint makes sense. It wouldn't be much different than a dealer ordering an exclusive. They have to pony up the money first and then wait. The hardest part would be getting everybody to agree on what to get. Then there is getting people to pay and wait. You could do some polls and see where it goes but if people don't put their money where their mouth is and the Kickstarter doesn't take off its dead in the water.
 
There are many ways of doing a crowd funding campaign, so I'm sure there could be a way to go about it.
What I would think would be the company saying what knife design, what steel, and what options would be available at what additional cost. Then the knife would be open to a pre-order period of a certain time, with a deposit. If the time runs out without a minimum number hit, then the deposits are refunded. There is no risk that Sal wouldn't deliver a promised product. There is when individuals do a campaign since they don't have all the systems in place. But if Sal put out say three designs and said, okay, we have to do at least 200, 500, whatever, and we are only doing one, then individuals would pony up for some, some dealers might throw in for a few, knowing that if the interest doesn't get there, they are not out anything. Maybe it goes like massdrop does it, start with a poll, then go to pay-up. The

The biggest reason kickstarters fail to launch is lack of trust. The biggest reason they fail to deliver is that its really hard to get all the things in line that have to happen. The crew at spyderco know how to fix both of those, and they wouldn't run into the overfunding curse. They would know that there was a range to be hit, and if it blew right over, then those guys get their knives, and maybe next year that knife goes into production. good way to test the waters as well.
 
Intriguing idea. I can see hurdles to overcome, not least of which is the specific knife/materials enough people will agree on, and pony up for upfront. And the wait time needs to be recognized for sure.

As gadgetgeek says, Spyderco/Sal is surely the right company/man to be able to orchestrate this, if he would consider it viable to do so.

No doubt there would be many suggestions of 'what'. Ideas from us? Up to Sal to suggest? Perhaps with a suitable engraving on it?
Maybe a discontinued knife, or a prototype as the OP suggests. Or something as popular as a Para2 may be likely to garner sufficient buyers, maybe in K390 or S10V or plain old 1095 or or or or...
No doubt you all have your own ideas/suggestions.

All that said, I'm very likely to be a buyer, quite happy to pony up and wait for it to appear, knowing it will take quite some time. Yes, I'm definitely interested in this idea.
 
Ha, I've brought this idea up before as kind of a joke when there was discussion of fantasy sprints in past threads...

But honestly, they are already at max capacity trying to keep up with the demand! They have models that have been talked about for years, yet haven't seen the light of day yet.
It would be a bit pompous to expect if we force feed some cash into the system that we could jump all the other production queue and get some other knife in there before others waiting.


That said, yeah let's do it.
Khukuri in solid HAP40 with grey G10 - GO! :p
 
I think it would be very much up to them to suggest as there would be combos just not possible, or at a cost that would be unacceptable. I would think the main options would be along the lines of FRN which would limit handle shapes to existing molds (not a problem for sprint run steels) or g10 color, since the only overhead is in the programming. to hit production numbers it would likely have to be limited to one steel, and potentially one grind (I have no idea how easy their setup would make it)

All that said, every company needs a point of differentiation, and near production prices on very short runs could be very attractive to some.
 
ooitzoo said:
Can you provide a link to the Dpx kickstarter?
Click to expand...

The Kickstarter campaign has ended and the knives are in production. They had some extras on their site though.

I'd like to see Spyderco try a revival of a discontinued knife first. I can think of several like the Spur, Lil Temperence and the Pro Venator but there are many others. Update the blade steel and maybe the handle material.

I agree that fitting it into a production schedule might be an issue but it seems like there's less risk to the company so maybe that alone might move up the priority.
 
I am scared to know what the up-front costs for a sprint run of high-end knives would be...
 
The DPX knives Urbans are $275 for full titanium handles and a 3" S30V blade. It's being made in the USA.
 
If I were spyderco, I would just start a kick starter for a specific knife, no input from the outside. They would have no problem selling 200 knives of any design purely to collectors. It would be less hassle of trying to sort out 25000 different opinions.
 
Spyderco has a huge pipeline of products in queue as well as the wonderful sprint and mule programs, so I think a crowd funded knife would make little sense while consuming lots of resources. Seems like it works best for a smaller company (dpx sounds about right) especially if it gives them instant market research (choose one of three options) and access and exposure to new markets, while making a long lead time acceptable.

As an aside, one of the joys of spyderco/ Sal is that he has a great sense of what works and what we want as well. I am happy with the sprints and would hate to divert his attention.

Unless we crowdfund a catcherman...
 
I wish this idea would have come up earlier. Could be a good way to sprint discontinued models.

Like a S30V Double Bevel produced in Taiwan. [emoji1]
 
I may be mistaken, but Sal has said he will not take money from customers for a future project. We all see how well it works out for the custom knifemakers who take money now, promise a 6 month delivery date, then deliver 5 years later.


I guess Kickstarter is not technically the same as the above, but really, it is.



I am much less of a knife-nut than I once was, so I am probably in the minority, but I think Spyderco has more than enough knives available (as someone above mentioned).
 
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