Website Closers® presents a well-established company with 17 years of experience marketing high quality folding and fixed blade cutlery. Their highly lucrative customer base has grown over the years and to deliver a monumental 86% repeat customer rate, along with overwhelmingly positive reviews that have helped keep those sales flowing.
The company’s success is no surprise. Over the years, the brand has grown to offer more than 1,200 SKUs, all with a staggering average order value of $116. Providing top of the line, well known brands, their gross revenues have been rising quickly.
Pocket knives typically fall into two categories: traditional ones, and modern devices that are made of composite materials with one-handed opening mechanisms.
So how did this company get there?
The company was first launched in 2004 with the simple goal of selling traditional knives online. Starting out slowly, they continued to build up their customer base and as they did, strong reviews about the quality of their products, fast delivery, and excellent customer service gave the brand a terrific amount of word-of-mouth advertising which is invaluable in the tight-knit knife enthusiast community.
The company sources only top-quality products that have developed a strong reputation among buyers, and they stock up to 200 items at a time. Because knives are relatively small and compact, the company has been able to stock its products in a single car garage and still meet demand for all customer purchases, they average16 orders being shipped daily.
The brand uses multiple vendors and there remains a constant flow of inventory from specialty makers. Among their top selling products are the brands such as Great Eastern Cutlery, which makes up 30% of gross revenues; the Lion Steel Brand (25%); the Viper Cutlery (20%); and the Case Cutlery (15%). They sell adjacent accessories as well, such as leather slips, keyrings, and educational books on knives and survival.
Over the years, the company has attracted a large number of customers, but found that there is no typical buyer. There are some customers who purchase a single knife around the holidays, and others who have spent several thousand dollars’ worth in one month. This business has done an excellent job of attracting collectors who have a large at-home collection and make several purchases monthly. Sales of their SKUs remain steady all year and tend to peak around the holiday season between November and January.
Marketing has played a key role in their success, particularly social media. This brand has been very active on social media, using Instagram (where they have 3,500+ followers) and Facebook (3,300+ followers) to post photos of their products and connect with collectors, hunters, people who love the outdoors and fishing, and others who make up the audience for modern and traditional knives.
SEO has played a key role in the brand’s success so far. While social media efforts have delivered tremendous traffic, the company’s blog on their website has also proved tremendously powerful for search rankings. An incoming owner could further boost these efforts with accompanying keyword marketing in product listings, meta data, and more. The company now receives on average 23,000+ monthly visits to their site. The company’s emphasis on strong content has helped give them top rankings on numerous search engine results related to knives and the sale of knife blades.
Two other key aspects of their marketing approach include PPC and email marketing. The company runs PPC ads on Google and Bing to help expand their customer base, and they take advantage of a massive email database of more than 5,000+ subscribers to send occasional newsletters to their followers.
This offering represents a well-established model that a buyer could quickly scale, starting with the option of adding their SKUs to eCommerce giants such as Amazon, Walmart, and eBay. Amazon alone would enable this company to expand rapidly by tapping into that retailer’s massive customer base.
Amazon represents another terrific scale option, by expanding the listings onto the site’s foreign platforms in Canada, the European Union, Mexico, and Australia. Fixed blades are popular globally and Amazon could be the ideal platform for marketing them outside the U.S. That move would enable the company to run PPC ads on Amazon and boost sales even further.
Another key option for a buyer would be to expand the SKUs to include newly emerging models of pocket knives and fixed blades, and to open this brand’s first retail store, giving the company a physical presence. Once fully established, the store could become available to franchisees.
Fully automated, this company is the equivalent of a well-oiled machine, so much so that the current owner now spends just 20 hours per week running it.
The owner, who does not have any employees, focuses on order fulfillment, community discussions that help the brand build its reputation, and general tasks. Customer service is handled every day as well, typically with around 10 customer inquiries coming in each day.
The company’s tremendous repeat customer rate and appeal to the many fixed blade collectors out there speaks for itself. After nearly two decades of building up plenty of appeal to the customers for this niche field, the company has a strong reputation within the industry, a loyal following and solid recurring revenues.
