Pricing question

Cody Hofsommer

Cody Hofsommer

Joined
Dec 2, 2011
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If a guy had 3 knives, let's say 4" hunters, one in 300 layer ladder Damascus, one in W2 with hamon, and one in high carbon mono steel without hamon, what would the price difference be? Let's assume all else is equal. I always struggle with this.
 
If you're benchmade, $5000, $1000, $125, despite a true cost difference of $5 between the three:rolleyes:. More realistically, if the basic knife was $300, I'd say $400 for the W2, and $5-600 for the damascus. If someone else made the damascus? Not sure, alabama damascus can be had for not that much more than a piece of high-grade mono-steel, so it seem unfair to me to ask hundreds more when it only represents another $30 in expense. But, if the demand is there you might as well be the supply, people will pay a lot for prettiness.
 
Similar handles and constructions, differences in the blade as you said, I'd look at about +$50 for the hamon and +100ish for the Damascus, relative to the carbon mono steel price. I'd leave a little on the table that way on the Damascus knife, but that's about all I can really get in terms of my top end pricing.
 
On a small simple knife like you describe, I agree with Jason. There isn't a lot more price increase for a hamon unless it is on a large blade or something spectacular. Damascus adds about $100 to a knife. Beyond making the damascus ( if you make your own) the work making a damascus blade isn't too much more than making a regular knife.

Obviously, if something is special or expensive, all the rules change. Make the blade out of damasteel and the cost on the blade steel may be over $100 before you do a single thing.
 
There are a few ways of looking at it. The snarky answer is "Its worth what ever someone will pay for it"

But there is an element of truth to it. Different factors make different parts more or less valuable. An example is compliments steel and handle material. If you put some beautiful feather walnut, cut so the crotch line runs right through the center of the block and put it on a blade with a feather damascus pattern, the handle adds more value to that knife because of the matching effect. The value becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
 
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Pricing is so difficult for certain knives. I put twenty or twenty five knives on a table at the local knife show and a couple knives sit on the tables through four or five shows months apart. I guess that they are priced too high so I reduce the prices on those knives and thy still do not sell through a couple more shows. My wife looks at the knives and says raise the prices so I do and guess what? Most of them sell. I think the pricing had little to do with the sale of those knives...its just that people like certain things and the knife you think might not sell will and the one you are certain will be snapped up might not. I now price them based on time spent, material cost, and difficulty. They all sell after a while. At the right time of the year Nov-Dec they all sell. My opinion...don't worry about it... spend your time trying to make the best knives you can and the rest will follow. Larry



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LARRYZ10 said:
Pricing is so difficult for certain knives. I put twenty or twenty five knives on a table at the local knife show and a couple knives sit on the tables through four or five shows months apart. I guess that they are priced too high so I reduce the prices on those knives and thy still do not sell through a couple more shows. My wife looks at the knives and says raise the prices so I do and guess what? Most of them sell. I think the pricing had little to do with the sale of those knives...its just that people like certain things and the knife you think might not sell will and the one you are certain will be snapped up might not. I now price them based on time spent, material cost, and difficulty. They all sell after a while. At the right time of the year Nov-Dec they all sell. My opinion...don't worry about it... spend your time trying to make the best knives you can and the rest will follow. Larry



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I think there is also an element of that type of myth. You know what stores do when wine doesnt sell?

Raise the price.

I think custom knives are in the same boat as fine knives sometimes. That people feel the price is directly correlated to its true value. That a 2500 dollar knife must be better than 250 dollar knife because one is selling for 2500 and the other for 250.
 
I hate pricing knives. People tell me they are too cheap often times, but I would just as soon sell them at a lower price than carry them around at shows for a few months. I set up at a gun show earlier this year, and was selling an old rifle I had had for years. I had priced the rifle at twice the price that I had into it, and I still believed it was a good deal. I had dozens and dozens of people pick up that rifle over the weekend, they got out their bore lights, they called their friends over to look at it, they went over it with a fine tooth comb, but they all ended up putting it on the table and walking away. The final day of the show a young man looked at, asked a couple of questions (basic things things, like caliber, year of make etc) and then bought it. A few weeks later I was at a knife show and one of the many people that had picked it up and gone over it with a fine tooth comb came up to me and asked me what was wrong with that rifle that I was selling it so cheap. I told him nothing, I was just selling it cheap.

I wonder if I have the same problem with knives? Are they priced so low that someone thinks their is something wrong with it?
 
Does using a fancy figured wood add much to the price over something like Micarta or a plain grained wood? A lot of the prettier woods aren't cheap from the suppliers. That's before you put the time into finishing it.
 
i4Marc said:
Does using a fancy figured wood add much to the price over something like Micarta or a plain grained wood? A lot of the prettier woods aren't cheap from the suppliers. That's before you put the time into finishing it.
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Yes. Double the price you paid for the wood and add it to the base price. Or something similar.
 
The rule I always heard was to add twice the cost of the wood when the block was less than 50 dollars and 3/2 past 50 dollars.
 
Double materials cost and then add in your hourly shop rate. That way your knives are priced proportionally. If ya end up spend extra time doin a hamon thats accomodated in the price. If ya made a knife with Damasteel its accomodated.
 
well i just use a formula to take out all the guess work....steel cost, handle material cost, glue and pins, abrasives, heat treat cost (or time including clay) and time it takes (multiply this by the labor rate you want) all get their own column. Each knife gets its own row. Use google docs to keep track of everything. Now you can tweak your formula as you wish and you have a record of all the details of every single knife! Once you get all that going you can add in a column for your asking price and the price your received. The real benefit of all this is you can track all your totals of expenses and sales and make tax time pretty easy. Doing this with google docs also makes losing your info a non issue.
 
I think Timos is being more honest to himself. Good Damascus is $20 or more an inch You would barely be paying for the actual cost without any mark up for mailing or a finder's fee.
Frank
 
I'm with Frank- you have to look at what you can actually produce in a week/month/year working at a pace you can sustain. If you're primarily working in your shop and making, say, an average of five knives a week, that gives you an idea of what you have to charge for each one in order to make it work in the long run.
 
I believe Timos has the right idea. Let me preface my thought by saying I'm new to the game, but pricing knives should be no different than pricing any other commodity. Add up your material costs, and mark it up by whatever percentage you feel comfortable with. Personally, I'd go somewhere in the 25 to 50% range, with less expensive material being marked up a bit more. The markup on material is not so much to make a profit on the material as it is to subsidize shop costs...electricity, equipment investment and so on. Again, just in my humble opinion. On top of this, one would have to decide what time and labor are worth. This is of course a very personal decision in which market conditions also play a role. We would all like to value our time at $1000 per hour perhaps, but will the market bare that cost?...unlikely. Pick a number, roll it in to the final price and decide if it makes competitive sense. Fortunately, as artisans, labor costs are our own and can be easily adjusted.
 
One of the problems with pricing if you are selling to the knife "collector" crowd is that there are way too many people making knives. The cost of say a straight carbon steel fighter with nice wood handle from someone you might have actually heard of is not likely to be much more than what it was at say the Guild Show in Orlando in the early 1990's. Random damascus added $10 per blade inch in the late 70's. You can buy bar stock from the lower priced American producers for the same or less today. I had vert experienced tell me that I should be charging X for a bowie and sheath combo a few years back. Yeah, i would love to do that, but the market would only bear 1/2 X on a good day. :confused:
 
I think I look at pricing a little different. I consider the materials like steel and wood as hard cost and my time as soft cost. Meaning I figure a rough cost for all the materials I use, wood, steel, propane, leather, kydex, abrasives ext. This is my hard cost, money I had to spend to aquire or replace what's used. Then figure in a markup on this that alows me to replace double what was used. Then I look at time, time for me is more fluid as its a soft cost. I did not actualy spend money to have the time to make the knife. I personally think it's very hard to put a dollar number on a HR of knife making, I have a number I use but that's just to ball park a cost. After the knife is done I look it over and try to approach it from a buyers point of view. If I was going to buy this what price would I expect to see on it. My gole as a knife maker is to make knives people want to use and feel like thy got a great knife for what thy paid. This being said I adjust my price to what I think is a fair price for the knife. I then look at what time I spent on it and if I spent WAY more time then the price shows then I look over my process and see where my time can be improved so the next one I make gets closer to what I want to make per HR. A good example is 4 bird and trout knives made from D2 I'm working on. Goal was to beable to sell these for $150 which I felt was a very reasionable price. I spent an entire day hand sanding one blade, not to mention the grinding, heat treating and wood handle shaping and sanding I did. So all things considered this one knife will still sell for $150 even with all the time into it but it alows me to tweak my processes for the other 3 so I can hopefully bring the number of hours down and still provide a quality knife at a price point that's good for the buyer and seller.
 
Thanks guys, it's as clear as mud now! Lol. Pricing is a difficult thing for sure. Especially when you get into art or collector stuff. Somehow, the cost of materials probably isn't considered when pricing a old painting. Picasso paid $x for a canvas and $x in paint. Now I know that I'm not Picasso, and his stuff wasn't even worth much until he died. But I'm just saying.

I had a couple of knives that where very similar except one was CruForgeV and the others where different Damascus. I sold more Damascus last weekend, so I guess I was t to high. It was a slow show for many of the guys, and others did pretty good. I was happy.

I think what makes it hard is that there is so many things that can alter the price of a knife. Design, fit and finish, materials, execution, reputation, demand ect. no two knife makers are the same, no two knives are the same.

I guess we will have to keep trying to find that price point that works for us. That and thinking that John Doe is charging WAY TO Much for his stuff while Billy Bob is under cutting us all!😜
 
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