Marketing tips for the beginner

Of course under a good teacher it could have been five weeks.
 
Seedy Lot said:
Needless to say if you are a Forged in Fire Champion you are sitting at a different level of name recognition...
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Those makers doing it full time, they have a variety of income streams.

Wife with insurance
Pension or partial pension, lots of 20 year military pensions
They do lessons
They sell knifemaking tools to makers
They sell supplies
They do youtube or other video incomes
 
12345678910 said:
Those makers doing it full time, they have a variety of income streams.

Wife with insurance
Pension or partial pension, lots of 20 year military pensions
They do lessons
They sell knifemaking tools to makers
They sell supplies
They do youtube or other video incomes
Click to expand...
Last 4 years I stepped into part time plus for knife making, probably closer to full time if I count all the internet knife talk. I have the the market from years of building brand and hustling knives.

Still no where close to making enough money to actually calling knife shop a legit job, especially after 31 percent tax bracket.

Knife work does make a profit but as I said before if all I was doing was selling knives I would be in the bottom 1or 2 percent of poverty level.

Only reason knife shop works for me is I have been a stay at home parent for the last 12 years supporting my wife's career.

When I started making knives in 2007 I sold off all my hobby toys to pay bills so I could skip out of my job and apprentice under a local maker. I reached a point where I had to jump into knife making full time or go back to my carpenter job. Carpenter job was paying 20 dollars per hour and with a young family it became obvious quickly that full time knife shop was not in the cards.

With that said when kids were old enough that I could start working in knife shop again the little extra income was needed to pay for items like dog food as we were pretty poor at the time. Even today I am still hustling knife shop for family items, just picked up a heat treat job for a kid I have been mentoring, the income will be used to buy winter tires for family car.

Joshua Fisher Joshua Fisher Sorry for giving you a hard time. I honestly don't see many people getting to your level so while i don't feel I am being a pessimist I do feel I am being realistic with what is obtainable for the majority of people pursuing a profession in the knife world.
 
what I'm getting from this thread is- there is no such thing as marketing for beginners!
 
The best marketing for a knifemaker is to get your name out there, and I don't mean just as a knifemaker, but a knife enthusiast, especially in the pattern or style that you'll be making. Join forums, Facebook groups, etc. and be active. Introduce pictures of the knives you've made or are making into all of these groups. That way once you go full time you've already got a developed potential customer base. Once you go full time let them all know and you'll have buyers who will be posting pics everywhere which is a marketing boon. Needless to say it's VERY important that what you make is very good, as reputation means everything on social media. If you make crap word will spread like wildfire. I sell everything through my website, don't want to deal with selling from myriad different sites because I'd definitely loose track of who gets what.

Also, don't try to do everything or you'll never make it unless you're in the top 3% of the knife makers, most especially if you're making folders. Get your parts waterjet cut, have your parts heat treated off site. If you're dealing with steels (especially for folders), that have a lot of scale and/or are inconsistent in thickness you can even go so far as to have your blades and springs surface ground offsite. That's a huge plus for consistency in the dimensions of those critical parts and a tremendous time saver. Production means volume and you want to maximize your time on getting other parts prepped while these large batch projects are getting done elsewhere. I generally have batches of parts for around 350 to 400 knives at a time running through this way. I've been at it full time for about three years now. Takes me about five weeks to get a batch of 40 folders done. It's not easy and is a lot of work but it can be done.

Eric
 
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*Edit
As of now, 11am my pictures are Back.....haha

Thank You Bladeforums.....

Screw IT (Information technologies). :P
 
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Horsewright said:
We were checking out new Macbooks yesterday both at BestBuy and Costco. The wife would leave all the ones she looked at open to our website. Kinda like handing out business cards!
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That is a stroke of genius, especially during the holiday season! Definitely a keeper!
 
Apologies for dredging this post up again, I’ve been locked in my garage practicing the past month. I came up with a couple things that I think are key to beginner marketing strategies that (career viability aside, just talking selling knives as a new maker)

Acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses; I realized I’m a fairly antisocial person, talk like a robot and am not a great salesperson but I have a few outspoken and well connected friends who are excellent salesmen, so to balance my cave dwelling neckbearded personality I’m going to put knives in their hands first.

Isolating target groups; I also recognize that tho my skill set doesn’t pretain to knifemaking or sales I know a lot of people who bang nails and nobody likes talking about tools more than tradesmen, so I’m going to try and design a chisel that catches the eye and has my stamp on it and disperse a few of those

After running through a bunch of designs I 100% agree with developing a core couple designs but I do think it’s important to try skill building variants regularly while noting their cost/benefit ratio; stacked handles can look good but dedicate more time on handles, and have a higher chance+cost of failure/looking bad due to additional visual reference lines so I ask myself is it worth it where I’m at skill wise right now or should I be focused on grinding profiles and experimenting with steel finishes.

And finally I noticed making a lot of knives im going to have to have a dedicated log of procedures used during heat treat so that I can improve quality as I move forward rather than guessing!

Just my thoughts
 
Make sure whoever you give tools to is active on social media/forums pertaining to the trade and is willing to take pictures and spread the word. If you just give a knife/tool to a random local tradesman you're going to sell a total of five items if you're lucky (unless this person works with a huge group of people, and even then itll just stay local). It takes years for word to spread locally. I know a gent who developed a fireman's rescue tool and was trying to market it among the local fire companies to gain exposure. It didn't go anywhere until he started hitting shows and the web. You can just do that yourself too without relying on the salesmanship of others. Take good pictures of your items and devote time on the web. You'll be surprised how quickly things catch on as folks you sell to via the web already have a presence and following there.

Eric
 
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Sometimes its better to sharpen the knife after the pic!

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