Wicked Edge is turning 8 years old this year! That’s significant enough on its own, as about 50% of small businesses close before they've been going for 5 years, but it’s especially important for us as this year will we be making some major changes.

The first of these is already well underway: The Gen 3 Sharpener. We’re going to be revamping our entire line of sharpeners and the Gen 3 is the centerpiece of that new line. It has the newest and most advanced hardware and is the product of a lot of hard work and help from our users. We’ll also be expanding into sharpeners for the casual knife owner; machines more for the folks who just want a sharp kitchen knife without all the bells and whistles of the Gen 3 and Commercial models. These sharpeners will be as high in quality as our current line-up, just simpler and more affordable. We’ll be announcing the first of these new models as part of our Kickstarter in June.

We’re also very excited to be moving to a much bigger location this April. We are currently working out of a suite of offices in Eldorado at Santa Fe and we are absolutely bursting at the seams. The business has grown so much that we've chosen to move the whole operation to a 3,836 square foot warehouse plus over 3,000 square feet in office space. We will have to shut down shipping for about a week (April 13-17) in order to complete the move, but once we’re settled we will be able to do business even better than before.  Check out some of the pictures we took of the new space being spruced up.

 

Third, we will be attending more shows this year. We’ll be attending the Blade Show in Atlanta and the New York Custom Knife Show as usual, but we’ll also be returning to the National Restaurant Association Show this May in Chicago and having our first go the Miami Knife Expo in April. We’ll have more news on dates and booths numbers as the show dates get closer. 

Though the launch of our Kickstarter is still some months away, we’re taking the time to consider our strengths and what we want to present to the Kickstarter community as well as our current customer base.

After looking at other successful Kickstarters (our particular favorite are these super cool sticky notes), we decided that we wanted to show the community who we really are. That is, we’re a small company manned by real people at home in the US. We’d love to show people our workspace and how we do things around here. We do tons of assembly and quality control by hand and we take great pride and care into sending out only the best products. 

We also want to share our philosophy of durability and dependability. A lot of products these days are made with built-in obsolescence. They are made to eventually break down or become completely incompatible with newer developments, forcing customers to buy another product all over again. Its bad business for customers and for the environment and in the end only serves one purpose: greater profits. We want to get back to the idea of buying a product once and only once. A Wicked Edge sharpener will last forever if you want it to.

Finally, we want to share the pleasure of really interacting with the process of sharpening a knife. For hundreds of years, hand sharpening was a craft that required special training and a lot of practice. Skilled hand sharpeners today still do a fantastic job but not everyone has the time or inclination to learn this difficult art. As for automation, it can be fantastic but in knife sharpening it often leads damage and only modest results. Part of the appeal of the Wicked Edge is that you operate it, you can customize your knives in any way you want, and you can share in experience of crafting something rather than just running it through a machine. You can achieve the same results that a master hand sharpener can without spending years of training. Moreover, you can get those results without worrying about damaging your knives like an electric sharpener would.  You can tweak your knives for specific tasks (cutting tomatoes vs dressing game vs cutting open boxes) or you can put the same edge on all your knives for easy touch-ups. People are always telling us that when they use our sharpeners, they feel a level of connection and pride to sharpening that you just can’t get from an automated machine.

We’re really getting excited about launching both our Kickstarter and our Gen 3 line of products. We are now accepting pre-orders for the Gen 3 sharpener and vise upgrade, so just give us a call at 1-877-616-9911 if you are looking to purchase our most advanced sharpener yet. We’ll be posting ETAs for the Kickstarter soon. In the meantime, leave us a comment on what you’d like to see in our upcoming posts!

The world of knife sharpening is full of anecdotal evidence. As the saying goes, “Give ten different people the same job and they’ll do it in ten different” ways. Go onto any knife forum and start asking questions and you’ll get dozens of different perspectives, opinions, and assurances that THIS is absolutely the best way to sharpen a knife. There’s a lot of great advice out there from very experienced people but the sheer amount of it can be overwhelming. Plus, anecdotes can only go so far; as sharpening itself becomes more and more advanced, so does the need for more scientific and precise information.

There are hundreds of different kinds of knives and their uses are just as numerous. At Wicked Edge, we want to determine the best angles and finishes for the most common types and uses. We’ve done some research already on the importance of having a clean, sharp edge when preparing food, but we want to expand our research to other uses as well. For example, what is the best angle for cutting tomatoes as opposed to cutting sisal rope? Is it better to have a toothier edge when cutting food? What about just opening boxes? What’s the best angle and finish for a long-lasting edge when you use your knife all day long?

These are the kinds of questions we want to find clear-cut, empirically tested answers for. Our plan is to build an apparatus that will hold a knife and cut through any given material with a slicing motion. We will measure the force needed to cut through the material so that we can get an accurate picture of which angles and finishes require the least amount of force to cut a given material. We also want to see how the amount of force needed changes over a number of uses so we can see what angles and finishes last the longest as well.

This is where our customers come in. What do you use your knives for the most? What kind of knives are they? Do you already have a preferred angle and finish for certain knives or do you just do all your knives the same? Tell us about it in the comments below!