Website Closers® presents a global powerhouse in the niche field of knives, shaving accessories, and camping gear. The international market for knives is a highly lucrative one, and this company’s emphasis on providing a wide assortment of popular, brand name folding knives, fixed blade knives, shaving products and much more has given them a phenomenal competitive edge. Over the course of nearly 3 decades, this eCommerce Company has continued to successfully expand, especially in organic traffic – they rank on page one (and many times position one) for a large number of short tail keywords associated with this industry. This algorithm placement is highly valuable real estate that is very difficult to build from scratch.
The company is a leader in the space and a sought-after retailer of more than 30,000+ products. Products are sold not just across the United States, but the European Union as well. The market for knives and survivalist gear has been growing tremendously in the past few years, and so has the online market for custom knives, making this an invaluable opportunity that continues to grow every year it is in business.
This brand has carved out a corner of this market by appealing to the industry’s top demographics of men between the ages 30 through 55. Many of them are quick to become repeat customers, returning to the website frequently to purchase a new knife every 2-5 months, on average. This is a popular niche field, from soldiers to outdoorsmen to average citizens concerned about their personal security; men and women have been carrying pocketknives for centuries.
By sourcing top quality products that are in high demand, this brand has developed a razor-sharp focus for finding the latest, most lucrative new products. Their current SKUs carry an average order value of $145 and turn it into a thriving source for fast rising sales. The brand has also earned a 30% Repeat Customer Rate across their 11 market sectors, where their products have no trouble finding receptive audiences.
Launched 25 years ago as a retailer for these specialized products, over the years this company has progressively developed a stronger and stronger reputation for providing high quality knives and related gear. The company has since expanded to include shaving razors along with similar products and launched several sharply honed websites geared specifically to those items.
Operating several websites in nations such as the UK, France, and Italy, along with individual websites for knives used for camping and others for kitchenware, this company now has exclusive models purchased from various manufacturers that keep collectors and casual knife enthusiasts alike coming back for more.
Their full stock model has proven to be highly efficient to ensure there are never delays in shipping out product from their warehouse. Today, the company has 27,000+ active SKUs, and sales are so strong that the company averages between 500 and 1,100 shipments per day from their 10,000 square foot warehouse. The company now stocks $3.2 Million in inventory to keep up with demand.
Another factor to their success and rapid growth has been the strong team that the current owner has in place. The company now employs a staff of 35, including six managers. Many of these employees have been with the company for the past decade and include top level professionals in their field. The company’s custom knife buyers have years of experience in this industry and solid long-term relationships with custom knife vendors around the world. Likewise, their creative department includes a creative director, designer for their email marketing campaigns, professional photographer, two videographers and a full-time social media director.
This high value team has played a crucial role in helping the company develop its excellent global reputation for incomparably durable and high value products while building up their loyal customer base and convincing those first-time buyers to return for more. Not surprisingly, the company now handles thousands of customer service inquiries a day.
The third leg of their success has been a highly sophisticated marketing campaign, built largely on organic traffic. Social media has played a critical role in their success to date. The brand has an active and creative approach to social media postings and has cultivated large audiences across multiple platforms. That includes 200,000+ followers on Instagram, 157,000+ on Pinterest, and 41,000+ on Facebook. The company has 115,000+ subscribers to their YouTube channel, and a video studio where their expert videos are filmed by a well-known leader in the knife space.
The company also has a stunningly high email database of 250,000+ subscribers which is effectively leveraged for regular email marketing campaigns.
The brand has a full-time SEO expert who focuses on placing keywords in their product descriptions, and the company has an educational and informative blog that is updated often and well read by visitors. Taken together, these tactics have helped drive stunningly high levels of organic traffic to the websites, which now receive 50,000+ daily unique visitors.
Finally, the company’s well-established relationships with its vendors are something that was carefully developed over the past two decades, and those unique partnerships represent invaluable tools that no other eCommerce site could ever replicate.
This company has built a superb platform that operates at full capacity, from sales to deliveries to marketing and product buying. Most importantly, the company has worked from the start to provide the best possible shopping experience for its customers, which is reflected in their superlative customer reviews and rising repeat customer rate. A buyer would be getting the strong recurring revenues that this company brings in throughout the year, with strong sales peaks during November and December.
There are proven methods for scaling this operation to much higher levels of profitability. The strongest approach would be to launch storefronts on Amazon, which would transition their highly in demand products to the world’s largest eCommerce site. Likewise, with an established presence and reputation in Europe, the company could expand onto Amazon’s international platforms as well. Another popular eCommerce site, eBay, would also be a way to help boost sales in the future.
In terms of marketing, the brand could shift from organic traffic to using PPC ads on Google and on Amazon once that platform is in place. On the organic side, influencer marketing campaigns have been a proven way to boost sales on social media sites and the company could explore that option as well.
Finally, this company could leverage another first: creating its own in-house brand. Having scrupulously researched which knives and shaving products are the most popular and generate the highest sales, the company has a firm understanding of what their customers want and could use that to create a new trademarked product that matches customer demands. That would provide this company with something no competitor has to offer and would be instrumental in expanding the customer base even further.
With sales so high, this brand offers the new owner the ability to carefully chart a course to scale successfully, without the need to move too quickly until the right game plan has been expertly developed.
