New stuff

[ChefKnivesToGo]

Man I feel like I am putting on tons of stuff lately and I can’t catch up. I still have about 20 items that are sitting on the shelves that have not made it on the site yet. Some are customs but many are general stock items. I can only dedicate an hour or two a day to this part of my job.

I have a question because a really don’t know the answer. Do my competitors add this much stuff? I never have time to look at them.

Anyway, all this extra space has now been filled and our bank account is running low. Increasing inventory by 50% year over year will do that. I need to slow it down a little.

[datster]

Mark, you have competitors? LOL! I've watched you grow the site for a couple years and have made a few contributions to help you reduce inventory. I haven't found anywhere else that comes close to doing what you're doing. Some others have little specialty niches but CKTG is definitely the mainstream knife store in my circles. I used to tell people to mention I sent them but there got to be so many I just stopped asking. Every one of them has said good things, many are repeat customers. You have built a great business with great customer service, this is my first stop and recommendation for all things knives and sharpening.

[Sean-in-AK]

I haven’t seen on other website that has anywhere near the variety as CKTG. And absolutely nothing compares to the information provided on the knives. All the videos are super helpful. Shipping times and customer service are also second to none! My hat is off to you go running a top notch business!

A big thank you from a very happy customer.

[mauichef]

I look around constantly and they don't even get close to you Mark.
Most of the US based sellers keep a much smaller line up of makers and thus the size of their inventory depends mainly on the depth of the individual brands.
Unlike you who deals with more suppliers than many of them put together! And then you carry most of their offerings. Plus the amount of in-house lines you have created is staggering.
I tell people I work for the biggest kitchen knife retailer in the USA and I believe that is not an exaggeration!

[Jeff B]

...Do my competitors add this much stuff?...

Please! They wish.

[MikeT]

I have to agree with daster, no compteitors. There seems to be no other online retailer that has wrapped their head around the idea of high performing kitchen knives synergized by the best ways to keep them sharp. Yeah, that customer service thing, though not all that sexy, is pretty important too.

I have sharpened my carpool buddy's wedding gift Heckles, using CKTG purchased stones. We have each other's company and the radio for our 45 min one way commute. He wants to know if there is something better in kitchen knives out there. Yes! Given his parameters, I steered him to to Tojiro DP gyuto purchased from CKTG. Given that the CKTG price is in line with the first Amazon price that pops coupled with all the great things that CKTG offers, CKTG is an easy recommendation to make to a friend.

I know you would much rather sell a boutique knife from a limited production artisan smith, but you are doing the right things to show people why they should consider doing that.

[enjay]

I have to agree with daster, no compteitors. There seems to be no other online retailer that has wrapped their head around the idea of high performing kitchen knives synergized by the best ways to keep them sharp. Yeah, that customer service thing, though not all that sexy, is pretty important too.

Mark has a great breadth of selection, no doubt, and I've personally experienced fantastic customer service. But, come on, this is an unnecessarily hyperbolic fluff. If you truly think there is no other quality shop then I will only say that you have not spent much time looking.

[Kalaeb]

I have to agree with daster, no compteitors. There seems to be no other online retailer that has wrapped their head around the idea of high performing kitchen knives synergized by the best ways to keep them sharp. Yeah, that customer service thing, though not all that sexy, is pretty important too.

Mark has a great breadth of selection, no doubt, and I've personally experienced fantastic customer service. But, come on, this is an unnecessarily hyperbolic fluff. If you truly think there is no other quality shop then I will only say that you have not spent much time looking.

Agreed, lots of quality shops out there. You have one of the biggest varieties but lots of competition and more growing every year.

Home Butcher puts out lots of new stuff and draws a big crowd with one off knives. Their CS is also top notch.

JKI is also carries a wide selection of top notch knives and I feel plays his social media/influence/marketing card better than CKTG. Again, phenomenal CS.

It's kind of a loaded question each of them do some things really well...you need to find time to shop the competition.

[Thin Man]

Short answer is "No."

That being said, there are other sites with extensive selections but they are not adding things at the same rate.

[-btm-]

Not to go too deep... but I think your buying power allows you to steer makers into doing some special knives that might not otherwise get made. It also allows you to order exclusive knives that your competitors would never be able to offer (thinking Takamura Chromax 210, Kono is a KS profile, etc.). This combined with the great customer service makes CKTG stand out, but some of those big special orders and your support of new "untested" blacksmiths probably eats up a good bit of your cash reserves. You have so many good options going right now that I think you are having the right intuition that if might be time to slow down a little, move some inventory and reevaluate where you are in the market. There are other great shops emerging so I'd definitely keep an eye on what they are doing. That said, you are still tops in customer service, information (especially in offering the forum), and variety. Supporting young blacksmiths might be expensive upfront but it helps support the entire craft.

[salemj]

I look around constantly and they don't even get close to you Mark.
Most of the US based sellers keep a much smaller line up of makers and thus the size of their inventory depends mainly on the depth of the individual brands.
Unlike you who deals with more suppliers than many of them put together! And then you carry most of their offerings. Plus the amount of in-house lines you have created is staggering.
I tell people I work for the biggest kitchen knife retailer in the USA and I believe that is not an exaggeration!

This has been my experience as well. I don't always find it a positive aspect of CKTG as a shopper, and I definitely think I'd find it a bit frustrating as an owner or someone working in supply/inventory.

The most competitive shops I've seen stick to running under ten "brands" and seem to avoid overt duplication between brands at any price level. You have a ton of brands (and sub-brands), and many of them overlap at the exact same price point, offering virtually the exact same thing. I've always thought of your model as the "grocery brand" model: you stock all the major brands, but you are continually offering nearly identical products for cheaper under your own brand. I don't think this is true at every price point, but I feel like the "sweet spot" of hand-made knives ranging from 275-325 is just oversaturated, and I think recent classifieds have demonstrated this, too.

I do like those aspects of your efforts and I think it is a huge service to your customers to continually bring quality work into the shop at cheaper prices using new names (Richmond, Kohetsu, Yohiko, Kaneshige...even when some of these are not your brand, you are getting exclusive, high-volume contracts for specific lines at a discount). This kind of duplication is nice at first, but over time, it may require some "pruning." Some of this has happened naturally (the discontinuation or falling popularity of certain blades, like the UX-10 and the VG, and - for a time - the Fujiyama blades, and even the T-F, which have obviously been replaced 5x over with other nashiji finished, stainless-clade, carbon steel offerings that simply did not exist before), but I feel like more could happen.

To put a fine, opinionated point on it, the added competition and duplication this brings to the site is too much right now. I'm a pretty savvy shopper who works in research and has been on the site for a while, and I'll be the first to admit that I cannot keep up with the nuanced differences between many of the newer lines and other, similar offerings any more—it would be much easier if I had the time, money, and energy to try them all myself, but just reading the forum and using pictures isn't enough to lock things in when several of the newer products resemble so many other products in so many ways. Oddly enough, I'm the kind of person who can keep prices and products straight across dozens of stores when I shop, over the course of months, even at "bin" stores like Marshalls and Home Goods and outlet stores and bin shops (a necessary evil when I was penny-pinching in college, etc., and a real advantage when I started day-trading), so this is a bit surprising. To reiterate, this is the primary "disadvantage" I find at the store right now, and while it may be personal, I'm pretty confident in my shopping abilities to know other others must struggle with this, too, unless they are really devoted "collectors" rather than mere "shoppers."

Another big difference from competitors is that I feel more and more (lately) that you're buying lots of stuff and then letting people purchase it to determine when it sticks or not. I find other shops to be considerably more "curated." I see this as a positive and a negative. The positives for the consumer are obvious, but negatives are that anyone new to the site is thoroughly confused, and sending them to the forum isn't as helpful as before because there are increasingly few forum members who have actually tried all of this stuff and can speak to its value in a way that "sticks" for someone buying their first (and potentially only) knife.

At the same time, I do love that your site just offers a ton of stuff and really leaves it to the consumer to pick whatever s/he wants. I celebrate that kind of store...I just find it a very difficult kind of store to navigate online at this time in these ways which - to me - precisely correlate to the issue you describe in your first post.

Sorry if this seems critical—I only share it because you asked and I know you like pushback of this type. In truth, you already know that I spend very little time looking at other shops, and I buy almost exclusively from your storefront even after my move to Canada (which has a number of its own fantastic shops). I definitely think CKTG is terrific and I promote the shop and sing the praises of the forum constantly to anyone who will listen!

[jmcnelly85]

From a certain standpoint, you are leading the way; therefore, you are your own competition. Taking your foot off the gas pedal can lead to other sites catching up or even surpassing eventually. Keeping staples of tried and true models as well as a continuous drip of new models seems to work. The idea to be among the first outside of Japan to use a certain knife has to be a draw for some knife nuts. It can be difficult, forum wise, keeping up on the nuanced differences from knife to knife, but word still seems to get out on some clear winners.

It might help the new arrivals section to separate what’s actually a new knife compared to a custom handled existing knife. I’m sure there’s a way to have a custom drop box thrown in.

[ChefKnivesToGo]

About 20 years ago I read a book called How To Drive Your Competition Crazy and it was about how to compete as a small business (Bricks and Mortar back then) with the likes of Walmart. His basic idea was you can't compete on price against big behemoths. They will outlast you and sap your resources and put you out of business. But you can compete with them on selection if you dominate your niche. You can also compete with them on service if you're willing to outwork them. This I took to heart and it's served us well over the years. We don't try to be a kitchenware store. That's too general. We try to dominate a tiny sliver of that market which is handmade, Japanese knives mostly by small blacksmiths. We also offer sharpening products that help customers get the most out of their knives. That's it.

These days, of course, it's Amazon that poses a real problem for any online retail store and I basically have burrowed into this little niche as deep as I can go trying to avoid them and offer things they can't get. It also plays well with my collector customers to offer new products from new makers continually, since buying the same Shun over and over gets pretty boring pretty fast.

It's fun for me to meet all these guys and try their knives and be the first to promote them to a wider audience. I know it's difficult to shop our store and it's hard to maintain a steady flow of new items that require a lot of work to add them to the website. But for now it's working for us and as long as I don't exhaust myself I think it's a good strategy. But to Joe's point, I do need to weed the garden a little more frequently.

[jobone]

We really appreciate all of it.

[salemj]

About 20 years ago I read a book called How To Drive Your Competition Crazy and it was about how to compete as a small business (Bricks and Mortar back then) with the likes of Walmart. His basic idea was you can't compete on price against big behemoths. They will outlast you and sap your resources and put you out of business. But you can compete with them on selection if you dominate your niche. You can also compete with them on service if you're willing to outwork them. This I took to heart and it's served us well over the years. We don't try to be a kitchenware store. That's too general. We try to dominate a tiny sliver of that market which is handmade, Japanese knives mostly by small blacksmiths. We also offer sharpening products that help customers get the most out of their knives. That's it.

These days, of course, it's Amazon that poses a real problem for any online retail store and I basically have burrowed into this little niche as deep as I can go trying to avoid them and offer things they can't get. It also plays well with my collector customers to offer new products from new makers continually, since buying the same Shun over and over gets pretty boring pretty fast.

It's fun for me to meet all these guys and try their knives and be the first to promote them to a wider audience. I know it's difficult to shop our store and it's hard to maintain a steady flow of new items that require a lot of work to add them to the website. But for now it's working for us and as long as I don't exhaust myself I think it's a good strategy. But to Joe's point, I do need to weed the garden a little more frequently.

Just want to repeat: your strategy is obviously good and appreciated by many of us! I think what I was trying to describe was the intersection of your original post and other "niche" sellers, most of whom actually have brick and mortar store fronts (which only adds to your frustrations, I'm sure).

To be just a touch more specific, I was writing in really general terms, but what I experience is related to just a few specific lines and products. I know that you prune things occasionally, and I was just trying to highlight that perhaps one thing to consider was to invert the "find new stuff" and "prune old stuff" relationship for a short period in the near future, as you've seemed to be over-emphasizing the "find new stuff" category pretty full-on for a while now. I know you've done this in the past, and that you continue to do it routine (I watch the close outs as closely as the new stuff!). But I feel like it had maybe been a while since you, say, compared your Masakage offerings with the many, many duplicates you have of these - many by the same smiths! - especially since these offerings (the Masakages) are also widely available by several other shops, whereas your duplicates are far more exclusive. I think the Masakage lines are great and serve you well, but as you point out, once everyone else is selling them, it becomes harder to complete and it may be more beneficial to focus on your more unique products than duplicate those, both in terms of other stores, AND in terms of your own inventory.

[jbart65]

About 20 years ago I read a book called How To Drive Your Competit
It's fun for me to meet all these guys and try their knives and be the first to promote them to a wider audience. I know it's difficult to shop our store and it's hard to maintain a steady flow of new items that require a lot of work to add them to the website. But for now it's working for us and as long as I don't exhaust myself I think it's a good strategy. But to Joe's point, I do need to weed the garden a little more frequently.

I see Joe's point, but I honestly don't find it difficult at all to shop the site. I know everything on CKTG and it didn't take me long to figure it out. Now I just check new arrivals every so often to see what new is coming in.

Obviously it would be wise to prune if inventory isn't moving, but I might not have picked up a few knives if you pruned too quickly!

[Cahudson42]

Mark, Perhaps you do the following analysis already, but do your sales follow the old '80/20' rule? That is, do 20% of your items bring in about 80% of your sales? A relatively easy analysis to do - sorting by declining dollar sales volume. By item. And by brand. And by supplier.

In a prior life, I was responsible for Inventory at a Division of a then-large electrical manufacturer. I always did this monthly.

If there really are close to 80% of your items only bringing in 20% of your dollar sales, it sure shows where to look to reduce your number of items..

Another possibly useful view is to run an analysis by inventory declining dollar volume. It's possible that 20% of your items may make up 80% of your dollar inventory. This gives you another tool to help focus on inventory level, by more closely watching levels of that 20%..

[mauichef]

Mark, Perhaps you do the following analysis already, but do your sales follow the old '80/20' rule? That is, do 20% of your items bring in about 80% of your sales? A relatively easy analysis to do - sorting by declining dollar sales volume. By item. And by brand. And by supplier.

In a prior life, I was responsible for Inventory at a Division of a then-large electrical manufacturer. I always did this monthly.

If there really are close to 80% of your items only bringing in 20% of your dollar sales, it sure shows where to look to reduce your number of items..

Another possibly useful view is to run an analysis by inventory declining dollar volume. It's possible that 20% of your items may make up 80% of your dollar inventory. This gives you another tool to help focus on inventory level, by more closely watching levels of that 20%..

That might be relevant in a Large Electrical manufacturer or other large company. But this is not one or even similar. And this is the point I think some posters are missing.
I think it's out of our realm to be commenting on how Mark should run his business in those terms. He is not asking for input into the financial aspects of his company.
He has specifically asked about other retailers in terms of amount of different offerings. No more than that.

IMO, Mark is following the number one, most important path anyone in business should follow. MAKE YOR NICHE and make it unique and obvious. Do not compete in a segment. OWN IT!

Mark and Sue have created a one of a kind knife store. Probably on a global setting.
There is, in my opinion, no other retailer on-line or brick that comes close to what they do.
You would have to visit many stores to see even a part of what CKTG offers.

Now does it please everyone. No. Nor is it intended to. But it seems to be working very well and I hear few complaints about having too much choice!!!!
Is it difficult to navigate. Not in my opinion.
Actually quite the opposite. I think the inventory system and way of seeing in and out of stock items kills the competition.
Other sites drive me crazy with the way one has to virtually put something in the basket to see it's OOS. Which in many cases it always is! I can name a dozen sites that do this to the point of driving me away.

The joy of CKTG site is the bazaar atmosphere and the Aladdin's cave feeling of discovery that one gets when browsing this amazing selection of unique, quality, interesting Japanese kitchen knives.

Mark. Don't change a thing.
You and Sue run a business in a way we should all aspire to.

[salemj]

I see Joe's point, but I honestly don't find it difficult at all to shop the site. I know everything on CKTG and it didn't take me long to figure it out. Now I just check new arrivals every so often to see what new is coming in.

Obviously it would be wise to prune if inventory isn't moving, but I might not have picked up a few knives if you pruned too quickly!

I was thinking of you when I wrote my post. You've bought A LOT more knives than me over the last 20 months...and you've handled more in pass arounds. As I said above, if I used more of the knives first-hand, I think I'd find it much easier to keep track of things. But without that (which, I assume, is the vast majority of customers we're talking about, who haven't tried all those knives first-hand and are coming to the site with just a bit of forum browsing knowledge), I do think it is a lot to take in. I think of all people, Jeffry, you know that you've cycled through a well-above-average number of knives over a short period of time!

Mark. Don't change a thing.
You and Sue run a business in a way we should all aspire to.

Ray, with all do respect, Mark also specifically mentioned that he was concerned his allocation of resources (his own time and energy, not to mention his "bank account") might be out of balance, as well as the suggestion that he feels behind in his work. To me, in light of this, it seems as if Mark is trying to figure out what to potentially change, even though I completely and totally agree that he is not soliciting advice on what to change (that's his decision), but rather how people experience the site.

To be clear: I think your post is appropriate in a number of ways. I just thought this ending was a bit weird since - although I agree that we don't need to throw out suggestions of precisely what Mark should change - it does seem like he's soliciting our feedback on at least one particular front (and 1-2 related ones) in order for him to make that decision himself.

Anyways, it was just a thought. Mark has mentioned before how he likes to use the forum, and it seems to me that sometimes he likes a bit of opinionated feedback in order to help him think through things. Again: that doesn't mean we should be doing financial analysis or giving financial advice! But it does perhaps mean that the more helpful feedback is trying to answer his question with various opinions or ideas rather than just celebrating what he does best. I mention this because I really respect your presence as a moderator. I hope it is clear that I'm not trying to argue a point, but rather to share a perspective. You're the boss around these parts!

[Cutuu]

Mark I didn't find your initial post an attempt for business advice, nor do I think you need it. You seem to be an exceptional business man who is leading the way. I find your site by far the easiest to navigate, while simultaneously having the highest selection. That is impressive imo. You couple that with a very ma and pa type customer service that is outstanding. You are dealing with items that aren't really perishable in a sense. So it's not necessarily that items are wasting. I'll also admit that since you push it as a retailer to get items in, sometimes exclusive items, it pushes me as a consumer to try more things. That being said, there are seasons for everything. If you think a season to calm down a little with some new stuff to catch up in whatever ways whether financially, or time wise, I don't think any could fault you. Perhaps, you may need a season like that. But I hope that you continue to be the bold Maverick that you've been.

So simple answer is your competition does not bring in new items anywhere near you. You are well beyond them concerning the matter.