I received this email from William at HAK about a custom purchase I made. Was impressed with qaility but extremely disappointed with his service. Just want people to know what they are getting into when they make a purchase on
www.hideawayknife.com
Good Luck
Hanson
To:
artemisweapons@yahoo.com
Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 10:03 PM
William, I went ahead and purchased the loaner on pay pal. It charged me the 51.75 price which included shipping. Is that right or should it have just been $44.25 with no shipping?
Thanks
His Response:
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:09:51 -0700
From:
artemisweapons@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: Error in HideAway mailer - loaner price is 44.25
Stonewash tiger claw 79.00 * .75 discount = 59.25 total normally charged for loaner.
Thinking it would add $15 shipping - I deducted $15 to get 44.25
Sounds like you got a deal! It may not be obvious - but these knifes go thru a lot of steps to get to done - and each step is expensive and involves shipping too. Ordering and shipping steel, waterjetting it, then chamfering the hole, tumbling 12 hours, heat treating, double disk grinding, grinding the knife, sharpening the knife, laser etching the logos, adding a ballchain, adding cordwrap kit, making a sheath - with kydex and rivits.
Lets ballpark it: $8+ $8.10+$1+$5+$3+$2+$1+$1+$1+$10=$41.10 not counting my labor.
That whole process can take a long time - a year typically for huge batches - none of the cost of that money for a year is included in the price. Money used to be cheap - now money is generally unavilable or expensive. The cost of money component of that knife - could end up adding $15 to the cost.
Consider my swap for size policy - where I pay to ship and pay to return a knife that does not fit right - some customers don't get perfect fit till the third knife - at about $8 a swap in postage, not counting any risk of loss or failure to return - that is $16 out of my pocket.
I have another way to explain it - think of that favorite restaurant of yours - where you are amazed at all the food you get for so cheap and you wonder how they did it. You find out how later - when you see them out of business - and wish you had eaten there more.
I am sure the average customer has no clue what it takes to run a business in America - given the corporate tax rate, corporate fees and overheads. As our government gets just a bit bigger each day - soon the effect will ripple thru and your $150 tiger claw will seem cheap at $50. There is one sure fire way for you to know you got a deal - watch what happens to the price of this knife over the next year.
Now luckily I will not go out of business. But the reason is not obvious. Its because I am a well paid computer designer and electrical engineer that bills out at $1250 per hour for database design work and other design work. Without that money - HideAway would not exist.
A knife can be made cheaper - but you would have to give the business to China - my knives are all 100% USA made. I could mold the sheath - someday I will - that could reduce cost. Each sheath is hand made. I analyse cost is every possible way - since my total business is world wide.
If you have read this so far - and think what I have said is reasonable then you missed the entire point and have no clue about knife costs. Here is the final punch line: You make one knife - and sell it for a modest profit. It is so well loved - that you get 10 orders the next day for the same thing from that persons buddies. Where do you think that money comes from to have started those ten knives a year ago? Those are the knives where if you run out or cannot ship in time the net says you are out of business and people start to hate you because you are ignoring them.
At any given instant the backlog on my knife orders runs about 2 million dollars. I am an ordinary person like I assume you are. I work from about 6 am till around 2am at night each day. HideAway is just me - I make everything and ship everything and do the web etc etc and worse - the emails - god - the emails! Thousands of emails.
That not to say I will not get rich one day - but have you considered the business cycle - that goes up and down seemingly at random? Do you realize a ton of people reserve 6 knives that take me a year to make and end up actually paying for one? If I come up short paying for anything - I am toast - lets say I come up short about 6K over 3 months - thats enough to foreclose a million dollar home that is half paid for. So I would loose $500,000 in a matter of 3 months if I did not compensate for so many customers clueless abuse of my site.
Then there are those customers that ask me what it costs to ship a knife. It is fixed in their heads permanently in a never changable way that the cost to ship a knife is the money the US post office gets. Funny - when I offer to have them show up and provide mailers and labels and computers and printers free and ship all day long free and run to the post office - they never show up to do it - but they still think the cost to ship a knife is what the post office gets. I have spent untold hours listening to customers explain to me that the cost of shipping a knife is what the post office takes out of my hands.
Now lets see - 11:58 PM - and 400 more mails to go in Artemis and then 6000 more email to get to in
infa@hideAwayknife.com. Not worried about running out of work - but I am very worried that the average person does not see what is going to happen when America runs out of capital to create new business ventures.
I consider myself to be a hero for balancing Americas trade - half of my sales are overseas.
This has been a rant! I love to rant!
I suppose I should disclose in all fairness that you can buy a fancy sewing machine with many stitch cams, a cord and an electric motor, plastic housing and case at Walmart for the same price as my cheapest knife. But if you defend yourself with it - it will break!
Then again if you mount the needle on a stick - you might do OK - but you cannot fire a gun and hold the sewing machine at the same time.
William
My Reply:
To:
artemisweapons@yahoo.com
Subject: RE: Error in HideAway mailer - loaner price is 44.25
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:12:45 +0000
William,
Your condescending "rant" was not needed to get your point across to a fellow professional.
Unless, you feel you needed to justify your business practices to your "average" customer what it takes to have a side business that is doing well enough too, as it sounds, have an additional staff member on board to help alleviate your woes of running a business part-time that it is starting to become quite well known, considering half of your business in overseas.
I thank you for the loaner knife that you provided me after several emails on the status of my original order. I placed the order sometime around October 2007 before another deployment to Iraq. My second job, because I am a civilian also who works his butt off managing a team of professional engineers developing the next generation military satellites. So I know what its like to run a business in America - given the corporate tax rate, corporate fees, overheads, personal manning issues, products not delivered on customer anticipated schedules and I still find time volunteer to shed a little blood, sweat, and, tears in the "sandbox" for you and every other $1250 per hour computer engineer who someday wants to strike it rich with the American dream with their second job, which sounds like to me is doing pretty damn good.
Since your website wasn't specific on timelines for a custom order, I didn't expect that it would take almost 18 months to get a finished product. If it was a little bit more forthcoming on time estimates for a custom product maybe you wouldn't have a backlog of 6000 plus emails to sort through or the high overhead on products that people haven't committed (paid) for yet.
In all fairness to your last paragraph. Being professional aerospace engineer and a professional Airman Guardsman, I am just going to say, condescending your "average" customers is no way to run an ethical business. I guess sitting behind a computer builds a lot of bravado in a person, especially a stressed small business owner. So once again thank you for the discount on the loaner blade. I will take that discount in place of the purchased colored cord wrapping which I did not receive on my custom blade. I guess we both break even on this one. Me deploying twice since initial purchase without a much anticipate back-up custom HAK (now I have two) and you selling two knifes and keeping an average customer informed on your hardships of trying to live out the American dream.
William your products are great but your business ethics, attitude and professionalism are less than desirable. I would have walked away completely satisfied with your outstanding products and customer service (you did loan me a blade), even though the process took longer than planned and the custom options were not completed as ordered.
Instead, I am walking away completely disappointed. All based on your unprofessional email that you ended this business transaction with. You should have left it at the first two lines, but who am I to question your entrepreneurial abilities when you obviously have over 6000 more satisfied customers waiting in your computer inbox, while I dared ask the question on a shipping price.
A word of professional advice: It doesn't matter how outstanding your products are if don't treat your customers with respect they will not return or promote your products to their peers.
Respectfully,
Hanson
...But still didn't decide to... I guess I held out in hopes of an amicable solution. Hopefully no one else has had any problems.
He emails this long ass rant about how busy he is, and in doing so, states that the emails are the worst part of it all!
