A: This is an excellent question and something I think every maker, artist, and creative person has to figure out at some point.
Putting a price on something you created yourself is a strange thing. It is not just adding up materials, machine time, and hours. Of course those things matter, but you are also putting a value on ideas, experience, details, and the years it took to get to that point.
Just today I learned about late 1800s furniture maker Gustav Stickley and his Flemish motto, “Als Ik Kan” (which loosely translates to “As well as I can”). This resonated deeply with me and describes quite well how I think about my own work.
For me the goal has always been simple: to do the best work I can.
The final price is not the starting point — the knife is.
A mindset like that is probably not what builds huge companies. It also means that the knives coming out of my shop are not for everyone’s budget. I fully understand and respect that.
However, it allows me to live the dream to the fullest and gives me the freedom to react to new ideas, experiment, and follow the inspiration that eventually leads to the next project.
Of course, running a business also means understanding costs and margins. Especially with larger scale projects like the Shop Built line with the TOKO, AROS, and ARN. The challenge is finding the right balance — making them more available while still making exactly the knives I want to make.
It requires a lot of work and focus to get this balance just right.
I have always disliked the “race towards the bottom” mentality you sometimes see in production. Cutting costs at the expense of quality. How many times have you bought a product, a tool, or something similar and thought: “I wish they had spent a little more time on this” or “I wish they had used better materials”?
That is exactly what I never want anyone to think when handling one of my knives.
While never taking pricing lightly, I have also never felt uncomfortable about the price of my knives. However, there was one moment that really made me think about it.
Setting up at Tactical Knives Invitational around 2010, right next to one of my biggest idols in this business, Ken Onion, and realizing that most of my knives were priced higher than his.
That definitely threw me off balance for a moment.
But I realized something important: pricing your work is not about comparing yourself to others. It is about being honest about what goes into it — the time, the ideas, the materials, the process, and the years it took to get there.
Als Ik Kan.
