how big is the knife community?

PitbullShogun

PitbullShogun

Joined
Apr 14, 2011
Messages
686
how big is the knife enthusiast community? i know everyone owns kitchen knives, but what about pocket knives? not much else to the question i guess lol. i know we have to be pretty big, albeit close knit.
 
Probably somewhere between coin collectors and garden gnome collectors j/k :p. It must be a pretty big community since high end knife companies are still in business.
 
Threads:754,236 Posts:9,399,232 Members:183,037 Active Members:15,909
These are stats off just this site. With 183 thousand members. There are at least two other 'cutlery' related sites with similar numbers.
 
Big Barn said:
Threads:754,236 Posts:9,399,232 Members:183,037 Active Members:15,909
These are stats off just this site. With 183 thousand members. There are at least two other 'cutlery' related sites with similar numbers.
Click to expand...

But there has to be some overlap
 
Big Barn said:
Threads:754,236 Posts:9,399,232 Members:183,037 Active Members:15,909
These are stats off just this site. With 183 thousand members. There are at least two other 'cutlery' related sites with similar numbers.
Click to expand...

Considering that's a world wide membership, hat is a tiny minuscule part of the population. If we include even people who are not knife nuts, we, the people who carry a knife these days, are maybe less than 1% of the population. We're enough of a minority that the rest of the non knife world sees us as weird, and maybe bordering on wacko.

Carl.
 
I would assume that most of the peoPle who come here are not members, I had been coming here for years before I joined
 
From what I've seen, somewhere around 30-50% of Americans carry and use a knife at least part of the time. Hunting, hiking, at work, at home. There are 300 million Americans, so potentially 150,000,000 knife users. Of course only a small percentage of those are active in the knife enthusiast community - online forums, clubs, knife shows, or buying/collecting regularly.
 
It depends on what you want to define as a knife community. Clearly, everyone owns kitchen knives; most of those who enjoy outdoor sports (hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, ...) or who work in a trade (electricians, plumbers, painters, carpenters, hobbies ...) own more knives. But none of these are necessarily knife enthusiast, and most would be perfectly happy with something from the Home Shopping Network. It is only a tiny portion of the population who cares enough to actually read and learn about their knives. The others would be shock to learn what we are willing to spend on a single knife.

Knife collecting has few widely based advocates. There are but a few shows or movies that mention or show knives, and when they do the portrayal is usually negative. The brain washing is even worse for younger generations where children's books have been scrubbed of any mention of the words "gun" or "knife", and related toys are now few and far between. So it takes either real world experience to cause someone to discover about the value of good knives.

n2s
 
It's a large community. BF the largest forum, but there's many others. BF is also mostly American (or at least North American), and there's other country/language specific ones that I would still consider part of the "community". Pretty much any hobby/profession these days has at least one forum, and while the knife community might not be as expansive as gaming or fantasy football, the fact that knives brings different groups together makes it quite large. What I mean is that in the same forum you have people that use knives, people that merely collect (and collect different things), hunters, law enforcement, etc. Many types of enthusiasts that might not otherwise have anything in common but the love a good sharp tool.

I would also say the community is very small, and with a long memory. There might be hundreds of thousands of us on various parts of the interwebs, but you can go pretty much anywhere and say "Mantis" and incite laughter, say "Steve Corkum" and incite rage, say "Loveless" and incite reverence, or say "Strider" and incite controversy. Although large in numbers, we're small and tightly knit enough that word (good or bad) gets around quickly. A talented new maker can go from unknown to overwhelmed with orders in a very short time because word gets around, and a scammer that gets outed can find himself banned across the various forums on the web overnight.
 
Even if there are hundreds of thousands of us, we are still only a raindrop in a sea of billions on this crazy ol' planet. We ought to stick together! :)

[video=youtube;0BYxjlRmn1k]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BYxjlRmn1k[/video]
 
A similar question would be how many people own a knife that costs more than, say, $40. How many people own multiple quality knives?

My guess is that some large majority of men own at least one pocket knife, but some <10% number of them own more than a few or would consider spending >$50 on a knife. The numbers for women would probably be way less than half that of men. The numbers who would join a knife discussion board on the internet or own >20 knives, particularly knives that cost >$100 are way smaller still. I won't get into geography here, but I'm sure it varies from culture to culture. And rural people probably own more knives than urban people.

It's still a lot of people, thankfully, but is probably >1% of the adult population.
 
The bigger question is how large is the community that likes Garden Gnomes that carry knives?
 
Big enough for the Wall Street Journal to create a front page article about 10-years back covering "knife collection" as a billion dollar hobby. Even with economic problems, I think this hobby has only grown since then.

The problem is trying to define what a "knife community" is. It is just too large and varied to be able to count everyone. Many people buy $5 gas station knives, do they feel the same as multi thousand $ art knife collectors, or someone who likes Japanese kitchen cutlery for use? I don't think these people feel any association at all, and yet they can all be consider "collectors". Then there are those who have been collecting knives all their lives, but who have never involved themselves with any groups or online.
 
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I try to promote the hobby showing examples of my using and collecting knives to associates who show any interest. Two of them have become enthusiastic knife hobby participants. Also providing knives as gifts to the younger generation when appropriate furthers our hobby. Passing around knife publications, catalogs and such advances the cause.
 
coop1957 said:
The bigger question is how large is the community that likes Garden Gnomes that carry knives?
Click to expand...

“Garden Gnomes that carry knives”? There are armed garden gnomes out there? :eek: Is that safe? I’ve never like the look of those things, myself. Sinister! :D

Moving right along, most people in the armed services also carry. Though they probably know little about knives, and use whatever is sold in the PX.
 
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