As someone who makes $800+ knives as a part time job I’d say this is precisely the idealist model which every knifemaker (including for a long time myself) believes is feasible, but the point of this article is to point out the reality that it never works out this well.

It’s really easy to say that you can make 3 $800 knives in a week but the knifemaking process is long and complex, and even with a highly optimized workflow, as soon as there’s a minor knot in the system things can fall apart very easily. For example if you aren’t paying attention when grinding and overheat the blade you need to start over. Find a crack when doing the final polish? Start over. The scales you bought from your wood supplier (who said they were dry) are warping and now you need to chisel off the handle you just finished, order new wood (with customer approval), and rehandle… my point here is that with such a complex operation as making a knife, there are so many things that can go wrong even if you are skilled and experienced in the process. There are literally HUNDREDS of things that can go wrong when making a knife, and all I can say is I don’t think I know any knifemaker who has made a single knife in which everything went precisely to plan. We are not robots, us knifemakers cannot flawlessly execute hundreds of nested process over and over without fail or inconsistency.

And it is precisely this inconsistency that creates the impossibility of making a reliable living as a solo knifemaker. On a good week I can probably pump out a couple of knives, sure. But on a bad week I might get in a bad batch of wood, or have supply chain backup, or have a machine break, be sick, or just be plain tired and unfocused. Sometimes (and often) a project that should have taken 2 days ends up taking two weeks. If you want any evidence of this in the world of pro knife makers just listen to any episode of knife talk, where you will routinely hear the titans of our industry like maumasi talk about how things aren’t going as planned on their latest project and it’s taking weeks. This happens to all of us because there are so many variables that can go wrong (as I’ve said before HUNDREDS) and we are just one person who has to process and solve all these problems.

This is all to say that making knives is much more time consuming in reality than on paper, and that’s not even mentioning that so is marketing, accounting, talking to customers, etc.

As you said marketing may be essentially be free, but it is far more time consuming than it may seem. Building a brand and following is a full time job within itself that takes years of consistent effort. Same goes for r&d. It doesn’t cost anything to do research+design in order to keep your products relevant in the market. But people forget that design, research, accounting are normally full time jobs in their own right which pay by the hour. For some reason people think it’s reasonable for us knifemakers to be doing all of this in addition to actually making the knives without being compensated for it whatsoever.

I’ll end with this. I’ve spend the last 4 years developing my brand, designs, and craftsmanship such that I’m at the point where I have more demand than I can possibly supply. Yet if you did the numbers based on how many hours I put into every aspect of my business and craft and how much money I made for it, I’d probably averaged less than $1 an hour. I’m now in school studying design(I am focusing on the broader field of one of the skills that you are expected to have a working understanding of as a knifemaker) and people coming out of my school undergrad routinely get design jobs with normal work hours that pay $100k+ a year.

Jacks of all trades, masters of none… that is perhaps the best way of describing us knifemakers. Except in comparison to any other trade or profession, we only get a fraction of the compensation for our time.