When it's not exactly Made in the USA - Hoback

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Quiet said:
I feel that I should clarify my own personal stance on this situation. For me personally, I am not nearly as concerned where things like screws or the materials themselves are made. I know that the US doesn’t make all the things required for knife making (or else availability is low). However, if a knife maker says his knives are made here, I personally draw the line at whole knife parts and blades being made overseas and then shipped here so the “maker” can Lego them together, slap a “Made right’chere in the You Ess of Aye, cuz MURKA!” sticker on it and claim it’s an American made knife. An American didn’t fabricate those slabs, or grind that blade, or do anything other than slap a box of ready made parts together. If that is the case, I kinda lose respect for the maker because I know why they’ve done what they did. Took something that is fairly important to some of us, and turned it into a marketing gimmick in order to sell knives.

To me; that’s right up there with trumping up a big military career in order to make people think that maker’s knives confer super soec-ops SWAT/SEAL ranger bravo HOOAH super powers on the buyer. Marketing is the worst.
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Exactly. And some companies do that and say certain products were "Assembled in the USA from domestic and imported components." (DeWalt comes to mind.) I may not like it, but at least it's being truthful.
 
Paratrooper06 said:
So where does your witch-hunt end? We going after Benchmade and Spyderco next? Any knife that says “Golden, CO” better be made completely in Golden, CO and not have Chinese screws in it or we will have to raise hell.
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LMAO I said exactly NOT that. You're clearly either taking this personally or so dug in that you can't have a reasonable discussion and instead resort to out of context arguments.
 
RBB2 said:
LMAO I said exactly NOT that. You're clearly either taking this personally or so dug in that you can't have a reasonable discussion and instead resort to out of context arguments.
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I tried to warn the other guy and now you.. dude will go on and on with bad logic, move the goal posts, and more.. until the mods close the thread. He does this over and over. Ignore him.
 
Quiet said:
This is the standard MO for certain folks. It’s probably best to just ignore them.
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shinyedges said:
I tried to warn the other guy and now you.. dude will go on and on with bad logic, move the goal posts, and more.. until the mods close the thread. He does this over and over. Ignore him.
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Yeah I'm seeing that. I was just checking in to see if anything new had happened with this today after getting done with work so hadn't followed along and just read the last page or two. I'm done with him at this point. Sad.
 
RBB2 said:
Yeah I'm seeing that. I was just checking in to see if anything new had happened with this today after getting done with work so hadn't followed along and just read the last page or two. I'm done with him at this point. Sad.
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Oh you can be “done” with me, that’s fine. But I’m asking where the lies and deception are, and no one has pointed out anything other than filling in the blanks with assumptions and “not correcting” distributors with COO.

The marketing is overhyped and can perhaps mislead people (really them reading into it but still a concern)… but the technicalities on COO are not out of line. Hoback is not required to disclose them.
 
Today I learned that a maker admitting that he will make batches of one of his “Made in America” knives in other countries without marking them as such, is somehow not misleading and that people questioning this misdirection are overreacting. Huh, ok then.
 
Today I learned that if manufacturers don’t immediately rush out and publish a list of every part on a bill of material and the exact country that part is made, people think its unethical and the company should suffer for it. Ironically, only Hoback is held to this standard.
 
jideta said:
I wonder if his mea culpa is enough to keep his dealer network?
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There's no longer a Hoback Knives page on USA Made Blade. DLT has changed the country of origin to "Unknown," BladeHQ lists it as "Unpublished," and KnifeCenter has removed their USA badging and now lists them as "Import."

Based on Hoback's video raising more questions than it answered, I suspect we haven't seen the end of the fallout yet.
 
Jordan@DLT said:
We adjusted our Country of origin on all of our Hoback products to Unknown this morning - we are not happy with what is - at best - a lie of omission about where these are made. The site has a laundry list of countries as suppliers or manufacturers now - if you look at it on archive.org this was not the case previously.

Overseas production is not a bad thing, however, strongly implying that these are USA Made and refusing to give any specificity on where they are actually made absolutely is. We have cancelled all purchase orders with Hoback and reaching out to him for the truth about these knives.
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Good on y’all.
I bought a sumo from y’all a few months back and I wouldn’t have bought the knife, or more so paid the price I did, if I was aware that it wasn’t made in the USA. Like many other dealers, it was listed as made in the USA, so I had no reason the question a reputable company.


I buy knives made in many countries, what I expect is a quality tool and transparency about its origins. I will not pay custom prices for a production, except for those shiros I bought, nor will I pay U.S. labor prices for “sweat shop” labor.

Greed can get the best of people and it’s a shame it happens so frequently in this hobby, or so it seems.
 
Quiet said:
Today I learned that a maker admitting that he will make batches of one of his “Made in America” knives in other countries without marking them as such, is somehow not misleading and that people questioning this misdirection are overreacting. Huh, ok then.
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Except of course he never claimed his knives were made in America ... or anywhere in particular. Other than that....
 
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