Directly from us or from us on select 3rd party marketplaces

Thanks for swinging by – I appreciate it!

Today’s retail environment is quite interesting – especially, in the knife world!  The most common place to purchase knives revolves around how the actual brands want to position themselves in the market. 

Historically, knife brands preferred to be wholesalers allowing various retailers with brick-and-mortar locations and a decent web presence to carry and directly present numerous brands directly to the market.  The brands were happy with the B2B model, because the dealers ultimately supported end customers with the purchasing process and dealt with customer service as well.  This approach allowed the brands to focus on designing and releasing new models while allowing the industry to compress and control the funnel through very few numbers of wholesale organizations.  

As large online marketplaces began stealing market share from the traditional knife retailers with more aggressive pricing that wasn’t dependent on supporting large overhead, retailers felt the pinch and the brands realized that they had to compete in these online marketplaces to avoid losing industry share to other knife brands at the same time.  Because of this market compression, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers have closed, consolidated, or stretched further into the online market to compete directly with the brands themselves while trying to differentiate themselves from the online marketplaces with improved customer service while shaving their pricing to compete.  That’s a tall order when a product’s pricing is dictated by the brands and ultimately challenged by more aggressive retailers that could weather the pricing pressures with immense inventory and sales volumes.

The challenge of the online commerce environment made it difficult for some brands and companies, but others absolutely flourished in the digital marketplace through streamlining their operations.  Furthermore, the digital marketplace provides massive opportunity for even the tiniest of brands to market themselves directly to consumers and win a tiny share of the overall sales.  Over the recent 4+ years, we’ve witnessed a surge of new knife brands that are making waves against the traditional large knife brands, because they can speak directly to consumers avoiding the recent past when they couldn’t compete under the traditional wholesale retailer model.

The wholesale model is quickly becoming challenging with select major retailers that can afford direct wholesale contracts and associated inventory bubbling to the top with many retailers racing to the bottom with pricing to try to get their slice of the pie.  Add the pressures of increased quality in manufacturing outside the U.S. on top of this compression and the challenges mentioned above are real.  While it’s a great time for knife consumers, it’s extremely tough on brands and retailers to differentiate themselves in the current marketplace – unless they successfully take their brand directly to consumers. 

When I set out to create SlicKnives last year, I decided that I wanted to build a brand that supported the expertise in our industry’s manufacturers while engaging in a direct connection with consumers using unique designs that are only available through SlicKnives and where SlicKnives decides to offer them directly to consumers.  The beauty of today’s tech allows for an easy way to speak directly to consumers through SlicKnives’ own website while easily extending our reach into preferred 3^rd party marketplaces.  This has been the focus from the beginning.

It is tough to build a relationship with customers directly when no one knows the brand and it definitely takes time to establish a positive reputation with customers.  SlicKnives is driven to help our prospective customers understand that we have set up acceptable business practices, we uphold our own high ethical standards and policies, and we have pushed ourselves to meet 3^rd party marketplaces’ expectations and requirements.  SlicKnives wants to prove that we deserve our customers’ hard-earned money by providing high-quality products while making them available where you prefer to shop.

I’m proud to announce that SlicKnives has met all the expected legal and business requirements to participate in both Amazon and eBay marketplaces with more 3rd party marketplaces on the horizon.  You’ll find our products offered on Amazon and eBay directly by SlicKnives, so that you can buy where you feel comfortable buying our products. 

Of course, we’ll take great care of you directly from our website, too – we want to earn your business and prove to you that we’re offering solid knives for a fair price!

Thank you,
Brendon