Has the internet changed the game?

N

noob93

Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
433
As everyone knows the internet has made marketing on a large scale much easier. Im seeing more and more knife makers blowing up on social media. There have been some past discussions about the difficulty of "making it" as a full time knife maker but I can help but wonder if those days are starting to fade. It seems to me if your producing a good looking product that performs well the time had never been better. Am I missing something here or had social media and the internet made selling knives much easier and as a result full time makers are finally starting to make some money?
 
noob93 said:
As everyone knows the internet has made marketing on a large scale much easier. Im seeing more and more knife makers blowing up on social media. There have been some past discussions about the difficulty of "making it" as a full time knife maker but I can help but wonder if those days are starting to fade. It seems to me if your producing a good looking product that performs well the time had never been better. Am I missing something here or had social media and the internet made selling knives much easier and as a result full time makers are finally starting to make some money?
Click to expand...
The danger for knifemakers and social media in my estimation, is that social media is very prone to fads. One day the maker is hot and a short time later....where'd everybody go?
 
I see where the fad statement comes in ... it does seem for a period one knife or steel will be the one to end all ... and it changes sometimes quickly ...

but real good makers and companies do find homes and get the exposure they may not have without such a format that brings knife knuts all to a central forum to discover brands or knives that we may not have had a clue about otherwise.

So just speaking for myself ... yes the internet changed the game ... not only for introducing me to new brands and makers and new steels ... but introducing many new friends that share similiar interests.
 
noob93 said:
As everyone knows the internet has made marketing on a large scale much easier. Im seeing more and more knife makers blowing up on social media. There have been some past discussions about the difficulty of "making it" as a full time knife maker but I can help but wonder if those days are starting to fade. It seems to me if your producing a good looking product that performs well the time had never been better. Am I missing something here or had social media and the internet made selling knives much easier and as a result full time makers are finally starting to make some money?
Click to expand...

For any product that can be envisioned as necessary, the person or corporation that understands marketing and how to make a good tool will make sales.
 
The internet provides exposure, as we all know. One of the effects of this is ease of discovery from people who were previously not knife people. The Dad statement earlier is correct, and it is also true that there are many more people now who have a “knife phase”, or are on and off with it.
 
I've been doing well the last 4 years. I doubt that I will ever "blow up" and I'm fine with that, I prefer it that way. I'll be making/selling knives with consistency as long as I want to.
 
Internet changed pricing for most products.

Now even Pawn Shops can sell an item for retail (or close) with a simple web search.

Also, paying close to wholesale is easy by comparing prices online from a few online retailers.

Beyond pricing, the internet allows great unknown makers get exposure and access to buyers they never would have before.

Also, buyers like me only bought Buck, Kershaw and Gerber per-internet. I would have no idea what a CRK, Shiro, ESEE, ZT or Hinder was. Hell, even Benchmade and Spyderco were unknown to me until fairly recently!

Both good and bad, I guess..
 
Charlie Mike said:
I've been doing well the last 4 years. I doubt that I will ever "blow up" and I'm fine with that, I prefer it that way. I'll be making/selling knives with consistency as long as I want to.
Click to expand...
I absolutely love your work. Mainly because I know that you LOVE what you do and are a fellow knife nut. When you say you've been doing well I take it you mean that your able to comfortably live off what you make selling your stuff?
 
It is like any business.

You need to make a good product, and get it to enough people and sell it at a profit. Like most things in life, and in business, there are pluses and minuses involved.
On the good side, the internet has provided a great and economical way to reach new markets, advertise, develop new sales channels, and reduce costs.

But it also has done that for all of your competitors, so that makes entry into the market trickier. You need to understand what the internet brings to the table and how to economically benefit from it. The vast majority do not know how to effectively do that. Furthermore, it is taking more and more effort and time to deal with the internet side of things. It has gotten to the level that people work for companies doing nothing but dealing with internet issues and marketing. Having a staff guy for all things web, is not in a 1 man knife making shops budget.

On the bad side of things, the internet is loaded with landmines. If you don't have some sort of a web-presence these days, you are dead in the water. You can't even count on "Yellow Pages advertising" because the internet killed that entirely. Having a web presence means you educate yourself ( a slow process, impossible for some) or you pay someone else to do it (expensive for all, doubly expensive for those who have zero knowledge, or trust the designer to take care of it). The internet has also provided a very easy way for people to talk about your business. Great if it is positive, but for some reason, negative talk always seems to spread the fastest and the widest. A bad rep can spring up out of nowhere, and haunt you for years and years afterwards. Usually you can assume that once it hits the web, it is there, somewhere, forever.

For anyone wanting to profit from selling knives, or any small business, the bare minimum you must have up and running would be:
A Website - Showing your work, models available, contact info, and dealers if you have them.
Email marketing - At least 1 mailing every 2 months, bare minimum. Once a month is better. Once a week is the norm for most businesses.
Membership and participation in online forums like BF
Membership and participation in social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

If you are serious about being profitable, then you need to extend your reach on the web, fine tuning your approaches, and giving people more and more reason to search you out. Again starting with your website, you need to do SEO (Search engine optimization) and keep doing it. It is a constantly moving target. Provide CONTENT for your customers. Give them a reason to come back to you, and keep coming back. Providing technical or historical information about knives, steels, knife makers, or repairs and servicing would be a good place to start.

So yeah. It is just like any other business.
 
The internet changed the game big time for both knife makers and retail sellers. Take for example Knives Ship Free, it is almost entirely a fulfillment operation (which is what Amazon calls itself). They could be technically be located anywhere with UPS, USPS, and FedEx service. Some have a brick and mortar presence, but many don't. The old school brick and mortar stores are struggling in this new world unless they can successfully branch to the internet. I still prefer to buy at a brick and mortar store even if I pay more. As to knife makers, I'd say you need some internet presence unless you are a hobbyist mostly and occasionally make knives to sell. In which case, you can probably get by with a social media presence.
 
For me, if it wasn’t for the internet I would think the Kershaw Link is the best knife in the world. I don’t think there are any stores near me that sell ZTs, benchmades, etc, any real top-of-the-line knives.....so yeah without a doubt
 
Yes without the internet I’d never got in to higher end knives or never heard of Hinderer, Zero Tolerance, Benchmade or any of those brands. The internet for sure aided the high tier knives success too
 
sXePhenomenal said:
Yes without the internet I’d never got in to higher end knives or never heard of Hinderer, Zero Tolerance, Benchmade or any of those brands. The internet for sure aided the high tier knives success too
Click to expand...
My knowledge of the higher tier knives would be very limited without the internet. I think the high tier knives are successful because of the internet.
 
Let's remember what the net is, good communication, on a massive scale

this 'can' result in the great benefits we see in this market: easy ability to find quality work, and reward such work, but also the other side of the spectrum: low quality work for low $
the cool part is being able to find all the information relatively easily...
before bf there were such things as newsgroups (which still exist; ), which were more tech focused back then, but easily had the best aspects of a forum like bf many years before forums
it's kind of died a bit, in the age of reddit, and all this other 'social' media nonsense

the really big issue we're facing now, since 'critical mass' of distributed info exchange exists now, is that the signal to noise ratio is going completely off the deep end... that part just sucks
 
If it weren't for the internet:
I would have 2 or 3 knives instead of 40.
No Blade Forums.
And I wouldn't be a bolabeenz.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top