We’ve seen an influx of new members to the sub and one of the questions constantly being asked is “why is the knife I want still out of stock?” Longtime members, meanwhile, are more likely to ask why the same knife costs 30% more today than it did a year ago. These are good questions, but the answer is sufficiently complex that answering in a comment reply doesn’t give a full picture.
This writeup will aim to present that big picture. We’ll examine how we got here, the current state of affairs, and some predictions for the future.
https://preview.redd.it/owygjsf4tvg61.png?width=227&format=png&auto=webp&s=ea8f629779e8d1509658cbbf2841548dbe1ae458
Growth in chefknives subscriber count 2015-present
For comparison, here’s that same growth trend compared to two subreddits with about the same subscriber count as of early 2018 (Delaware and Wildlife)
Subscriber growth of chefknives (blue) compared to Delaware and Wildlife (green and yellow). Source: subredditstats.com
If you look at growth rates across other kitchen knife communities you’ll see similar trends. More people than ever are talking about their favorite work cleaver, looking for an “upgrade” recommendation, or asking how to sharpen their grandpa’s vintage sabatier.
We need to be careful in recognizing that these trends play a part in overall growth in phenomena like Reddit, a revival in home cooking, and more. Yet even when compared against these background events, the surge in kitchen knives is remarkable. Reddit approximately doubled its subscribers and posts between 2018-2020. chefknives has doubled three times.
Ultimately that means more of us in the kitchen out of choice. Nowadays it’s unlikely that Redditors here have (or are) a dedicated parent or spouse who stays at home and cooks all the meals. More likely is a sharing of labor in the kitchen; or, where couples take regular home tasks those chores are less likely to be gender-assigned. Furthermore, the amount of couples choosing to have children is trending downward as the age of first-time parents goes up. Fast food and other pre-fabricated meals are cheap and readily available for those who don’t feel like cooking. Working adults are therefore more likely to choose participation in home cooking than ever before.
Against this unique backdrop began a rebirth of cooking at home - Google Consumer Surveys from 2015 showed discovery search terms on the rise (“best recipes” saw 50% increases year-over-year) and online populations spending increased time researching recipes. Social media programming like Tasty, Binging with Babish, Laura in the Kitchen, and Maangchi took over our Facebook feeds and YouTube recommendations out of nowhere.
Source: Acosta research \"COVID-19: Reinventing How America Eats\"
And then, suddenly, home cooking became a necessity for us all. Restaurants closed and grocery stores faced massive supply chain issues shelving their most popular products. A population already casual fans of Bon Appetit and Beat Bobby Flay suddenly found themselves unexpectedly making fermented foods come alive and, while certainly not giving professional chefs a run for their money, then at least discovering their homemade chicken nuggets beat the hell out of Tyson’s frozen imitation.
Many of us saw 2020 turn our nascent interest into a favorite daily hobby. So, like the earlier run on toilet paper there began a run on high-end kitchen knives.
Unfortunately, once we get more specific about what a high end knife is, people tend to have wildly different standards.
I fully anticipate this will be the graphic people seize upon in the comments section, which is why I added descriptive text. That probably won't stop a few screeches about what high-end actually means but, eh, c'est la vie
I’m not going to bother saying where high-end knives begin, but for now let’s simplify to somewhere >=$100. This limits us to a handful of brands (at major retailers, at least) and comprises the vast majority of discussed lines here on the sub.
If we look at Internet search terms for high-end brands, we see people losing interest in established names that cannot prove their price to performance value. For example, let’s consider Google search rates associated with traditional German brands like “wusthof,” “henckels,” “messermeister,” etc.
source: Google Trends
All of these terms have seen a slow decline in search interest from 2007 onwards. In comparison, between 2014 and 2018 the interest in “gyuto” increased on average by 50% while more general cooking terms like “recipe” or “saucepan” have seen slow, steady increases.
Why are the traditional Solingen brands losing the interest of consumers? One theory is that knife designs are fads like clothing or trendy restaurants - a full-bolster Wüsthof and Nautica jacket may have been all the rage in the early 2000s, but interests simply change over time. If this theory is correct, the current “fad” of Japanese profiles, damascus cladding, Serbian chef knives, etc. are all temporary tastes which will give way to the next fad.
A related explanation is that the Red Queen hypothesis is at work - a theory from evolutionary biology that suggests adaptation is necessary just for survival. Indeed, many of the classic lines of these brands have changed little in the past years and certainly the main differences have been cosmetic. This explanation places blame for brand decline on the brand itself rather than consumer preferences. While unpleasant to point fingers, it’s worth exploring the other side of this coin to get a complete picture. In other words, let’s explore brands that are successfully adapting.
I won’t try to explain why Wüsthof hasn’t had luck making a competitive nakiri or why Messermeister allowed their awful “usuba” design past the concept phase. Suffice to say, the knives that western retailers are pivoting toward tend to be Japanese imports. This may be occasionally disguised by branding, but make no mistake that these are not German copies. Zwilling simply purchased a large manufacturer in Seki City; it becomes obvious when you put them side-by-side with the other Seki manufacturer sold at major American retailers.
Knife lines sold under a German and Japanese brand respectively.
Meanwhile, co-opting manufacturing (either by rebranding OEM knives or simply sourcing from the same supply chain) is not exactly a new concept. While this practice is less visible in major brands, it is prolific in the Japanese native market and within smaller retailers in the U.S. For example, take the first design from the Zwilling vs. Kai graphic above and see how it’s copied ad nauseum:
I'm not sure how many of these originate from the same knife blanks vs. different sources of steel that just happen to look very, very similar.
Okay - so what does this mean for Japanese and European manufacturers? For the Europeans, things are not looking good. Unless they somehow convince consumers that their performance to price ratio is going up (and this is a losing economic proposition at present), then major restructuring of their industry is on the horizon.
Meanwhile, the remaining question for Japanese manufacturers is twofold: (1) how do they compete against manufacturing in countries with even lower production cost bases and (2) can they scale up fast enough to deal with this demand? Keep these questions in mind as we’ll soon return to the problem with supply.
Meanwhile, online communities have been building their following over years. Each community tends to have their favorite brands with some overlap, but this knowledge base tends to be built up over years and decades. That’s because trusted reviews are infrequent (we want more!) and consensus takes time to develop. As consumers turned online, they found communities recommending products already facing scarcity issues.
What do you get when combining exponential demand with a shift in consumer preferences for a relatively small market of available knives? A run on supply.
Typical factory setting of Japanese knife manufacture. This particular factory produces both low and high-end knives
High-end knives can be similarly produced at volume, but the production process is more demanding. With higher performance requirements come lower tolerances for error and this means additional training for workers. Heat treatment must be more exacting so that grinds can fit within tighter parameters. This often requires cross-process knowledge so that the sharpener, forger, and metallurgist each understand and can identify minor discrepancies in the others’ processes. Sometimes the sharpener, forger, metallurgist, and polisher are the same person - though this is less common than marketers would like you to believe. Eventually, workers can specialize in a single aspect like polishing or forging and they become so good that others will solicit their services as part of their own process.
So in summary, high-end manufacturing requires more training. Some of that additional training is cross-disciplinary while some is highly specialized. In practice, this means working in various positions across production before settling into a specialty. All that additional training takes years, which is why apprenticeships and decades-long careers are the norm in high-end Japanese manufacturing.
First a little bit more about Kenji. He didn’t start his career in bladesmithing - in fact, despite his city being famous for metalworking and knives, everybody told him that industry was moribund back in the 2000s when he went to university. So, he worked his first years designing heavy machinery before a family emergency unexpectedly brought him into the family business. Years later, he has grown into a management role for the production where he has two full-time employees plus an apprentice. One of those employees is the father of his childhood friend. The two families’ knife businesses merged several years ago.
Now it’s 2018 and Kenji is seeing demand skyrocket. He knows that even if production doubled, he would have a hard time meeting demand. So, how can he double production as quickly as possible while maintaining approximately equal product quality?
In short, he cannot. We’ve already covered how slow training can be, but hiring experienced workers to train them can be equally taxing. That employee whose child was schoolmates with Kenji? None of his sons went into knife making because they saw it as a dead end professionally. Similarly a generation of family businesses shrunk or died out and so Kenji was a dying breed when the market suddenly became hot. Even as knifemaking becomes a viable career once again, finding apprentices is not simple. Many are mindful that consumer interest could quickly return to apathy and such a career does not pay dividends for decades.
Kenji’s story is the norm in high-end Japanese production. Even at a breakneck pace, it will take him several years to double production. If the market should falter during this time, it would be disastrous for his business’ solvency.
Historical data for "Kenji"
Of course price increases have been happening over time, but slowly. Many makers are still fulfilling backorders - sellers swap stories about shipments arriving for orders placed years prior. Others are under obligations to sell via wholesalers or trade brokers who behave territorially when vendors or other middlemen encroach on their network. Finally, every maker is conscious of how their prices play into the overall landscape of colleagues and competition. Did you apprentice under another bladesmith? If so, what happens if you start selling your knives for more than him? What message would that send and how would he react?
The net effect of this is a market with unusually rigid prices and inflexible scalability. These problems are not intractable, but like all market shortcomings they require time to fix. Beginning in 2020, that time suddenly became equally scarce.
Then suddenly that already scarce supply lost crucial days of business production as Japan first began implementing workplace hygiene measures before entering a state of emergency from April until May. These along with other interruptions have severely hampered production capabilities during a time when the business pipeline could hardly afford it.
The run on supply that we explored at the end of Part I is different than the slow demand increases from the decade prior. Large manufacturers had time to expand operations into China and Indonesia while small manufacturers took on apprentices. OEM practices improved and producers were able to streamline their work over months and years. Everybody lagged a little behind with the promise that soon, supply would begin to scale as young apprentices became journeymen and then master smiths.
This run on supply caused a multiplier in demand as production scaled down. Manufacturers no longer lag slightly behind their orders - vendors are reporting it will take years for operations to recover and resume the same pace they had before.
The key question is whether Japanese manufacturing can scale quickly enough to preserve their market share at the $100-500 range. The domestic Japanese market likely needs 10-20 years to scale up production. The question is whether foreign manufacturing needs this long to capture market share, even if Japan does manage to scale up eventually. The past five years have seen neighboring countries scaling up their production quality and doubling quantity every few years, so things are not looking great for the domestic Japanese market. Here is a predictive model based on the past five years of growth.
Predicted model of market share after 15 years wherein Japan doubles production while China, Indonesia, and Vietnam each double every 3-5 years.
Yet there are even more extreme imitators coming out of China and Southeast Asia who move faster and are less scrupulous about marketing. They flood Facebook with ads featuring shiny damascus blades with handles so colorful it looks like an M&M mass murder. These companies move massive volume before customers grow wise and thus hasten the lifetime of the fad. For some, it’s an educational experience. For others, they’re just happy they scratched the itch.
At any rate, movement like this eventually spells the end of one consumer taste to be replaced with another. So, I predict that the current fads (VG-10 damascus, hammered finishes, serbian chef knives) will soon fade and be replaced by others. One way this prediction might come to pass is that two years from now semi-scam companies will start advertising cheap cu mai (five layer steel with a stripe of nickel) offerings instead of their current Sakai Takayuki imitations. Or maybe it will be a faux kasumi finish or etched core stainless-clad instead.
This will, of course, come with challenges. Knife enthusiasts mostly have bitter tastes in their mouths with the memory of the Shun Ken Onion and members of the forum here have pointed out that ZKramers struggle to produce consistently good geometries. I don’t necessarily predict these partnerships will produce good high-end knives.
Instead, newcomers will soon replace the current favorites. Five years from now, the most sought-after knives will have diversified and new names will replace the old ones slowly. In the past five years, those new names have mostly been Japanese. I suspect the new ones may not be.
Until then, may the back in stock notifications be ever in your favor.
submitted by marine775 to chefknives [link] [comments] This writeup will aim to present that big picture. We’ll examine how we got here, the current state of affairs, and some predictions for the future.
https://preview.redd.it/owygjsf4tvg61.png?width=227&format=png&auto=webp&s=ea8f629779e8d1509658cbbf2841548dbe1ae458
Part I: Demand for high-end kitchen knives is increasing
It’s hard to nail down exactly why demand has increased. There are many underlying causes and yet each of them individually only goes so far. We’ll consider them in combination to understand the surge.Online interest in knives is growing
Let’s begin close to home. Here at chefknives, we’re about to reach 100k subscribers. That’s a meteoric rise from a small following just four years ago. Here’s how that growth rate looks:
Growth in chefknives subscriber count 2015-present
For comparison, here’s that same growth trend compared to two subreddits with about the same subscriber count as of early 2018 (Delaware and Wildlife)
Subscriber growth of chefknives (blue) compared to Delaware and Wildlife (green and yellow). Source: subredditstats.com
If you look at growth rates across other kitchen knife communities you’ll see similar trends. More people than ever are talking about their favorite work cleaver, looking for an “upgrade” recommendation, or asking how to sharpen their grandpa’s vintage sabatier.
We need to be careful in recognizing that these trends play a part in overall growth in phenomena like Reddit, a revival in home cooking, and more. Yet even when compared against these background events, the surge in kitchen knives is remarkable. Reddit approximately doubled its subscribers and posts between 2018-2020. chefknives has doubled three times.
Home cooking was undergoing an early renaissance leading into 2020
It’s no longer the idyllic 1950s. As economic pressure and then cultural allowances pushed traditional gender roles into a more diverse working environment, the reality of the American kitchen became at once more egalitarian and less dedicated. Critics decried the decline of home meals as a loss of culture. More pragmatic Americans saw it as an economic reality.Ultimately that means more of us in the kitchen out of choice. Nowadays it’s unlikely that Redditors here have (or are) a dedicated parent or spouse who stays at home and cooks all the meals. More likely is a sharing of labor in the kitchen; or, where couples take regular home tasks those chores are less likely to be gender-assigned. Furthermore, the amount of couples choosing to have children is trending downward as the age of first-time parents goes up. Fast food and other pre-fabricated meals are cheap and readily available for those who don’t feel like cooking. Working adults are therefore more likely to choose participation in home cooking than ever before.
Against this unique backdrop began a rebirth of cooking at home - Google Consumer Surveys from 2015 showed discovery search terms on the rise (“best recipes” saw 50% increases year-over-year) and online populations spending increased time researching recipes. Social media programming like Tasty, Binging with Babish, Laura in the Kitchen, and Maangchi took over our Facebook feeds and YouTube recommendations out of nowhere.
Source: Acosta research \"COVID-19: Reinventing How America Eats\"
And then, suddenly, home cooking became a necessity for us all. Restaurants closed and grocery stores faced massive supply chain issues shelving their most popular products. A population already casual fans of Bon Appetit and Beat Bobby Flay suddenly found themselves unexpectedly making fermented foods come alive and, while certainly not giving professional chefs a run for their money, then at least discovering their homemade chicken nuggets beat the hell out of Tyson’s frozen imitation.
Many of us saw 2020 turn our nascent interest into a favorite daily hobby. So, like the earlier run on toilet paper there began a run on high-end kitchen knives.
Entrenched brands are losing share in the high-end market
Until now I’ve delayed defining what high-end means. What exactly makes a high-end knife? We’re certainly not talking about $15 supermarket knives or the $30 indestructible house knife that line cooks use to chop parsley and open stubborn cans. Rather, we’re speaking of what somebody buys when they want to invest a little more. That’s the chef de commis who wants to start bringing their own knife to work or the home cook staring longingly through the glass front window of a Williams-Sonoma.Unfortunately, once we get more specific about what a high end knife is, people tend to have wildly different standards.
I fully anticipate this will be the graphic people seize upon in the comments section, which is why I added descriptive text. That probably won't stop a few screeches about what high-end actually means but, eh, c'est la vie
I’m not going to bother saying where high-end knives begin, but for now let’s simplify to somewhere >=$100. This limits us to a handful of brands (at major retailers, at least) and comprises the vast majority of discussed lines here on the sub.
If we look at Internet search terms for high-end brands, we see people losing interest in established names that cannot prove their price to performance value. For example, let’s consider Google search rates associated with traditional German brands like “wusthof,” “henckels,” “messermeister,” etc.
source: Google Trends
All of these terms have seen a slow decline in search interest from 2007 onwards. In comparison, between 2014 and 2018 the interest in “gyuto” increased on average by 50% while more general cooking terms like “recipe” or “saucepan” have seen slow, steady increases.
Why are the traditional Solingen brands losing the interest of consumers? One theory is that knife designs are fads like clothing or trendy restaurants - a full-bolster Wüsthof and Nautica jacket may have been all the rage in the early 2000s, but interests simply change over time. If this theory is correct, the current “fad” of Japanese profiles, damascus cladding, Serbian chef knives, etc. are all temporary tastes which will give way to the next fad.
A related explanation is that the Red Queen hypothesis is at work - a theory from evolutionary biology that suggests adaptation is necessary just for survival. Indeed, many of the classic lines of these brands have changed little in the past years and certainly the main differences have been cosmetic. This explanation places blame for brand decline on the brand itself rather than consumer preferences. While unpleasant to point fingers, it’s worth exploring the other side of this coin to get a complete picture. In other words, let’s explore brands that are successfully adapting.
The high-end market is pivoting away from Europe and toward Japanese manufacturing
If consumers have a new standard in aesthetic and performance then how can existing brands stay relevant? Large household names like Zwilling, Victorinox, Wüsthof, Kai, and Messermeister have had varying success in introducing new knives in large western retailers. Focusing on the American retail space, we see that knives which successfully embrace the new consumer demand already own or else license pre-existing, non-Western manufacturing. Struggling brands, on the other hand, try to adapt Solingen practice to produce novel designs and the result ranges from “interesting interpretation” to “missed the point.”[1] [2] [3]I won’t try to explain why Wüsthof hasn’t had luck making a competitive nakiri or why Messermeister allowed their awful “usuba” design past the concept phase. Suffice to say, the knives that western retailers are pivoting toward tend to be Japanese imports. This may be occasionally disguised by branding, but make no mistake that these are not German copies. Zwilling simply purchased a large manufacturer in Seki City; it becomes obvious when you put them side-by-side with the other Seki manufacturer sold at major American retailers.
Knife lines sold under a German and Japanese brand respectively.
Meanwhile, co-opting manufacturing (either by rebranding OEM knives or simply sourcing from the same supply chain) is not exactly a new concept. While this practice is less visible in major brands, it is prolific in the Japanese native market and within smaller retailers in the U.S. For example, take the first design from the Zwilling vs. Kai graphic above and see how it’s copied ad nauseum:
I'm not sure how many of these originate from the same knife blanks vs. different sources of steel that just happen to look very, very similar.
Okay - so what does this mean for Japanese and European manufacturers? For the Europeans, things are not looking good. Unless they somehow convince consumers that their performance to price ratio is going up (and this is a losing economic proposition at present), then major restructuring of their industry is on the horizon.
Meanwhile, the remaining question for Japanese manufacturers is twofold: (1) how do they compete against manufacturing in countries with even lower production cost bases and (2) can they scale up fast enough to deal with this demand? Keep these questions in mind as we’ll soon return to the problem with supply.
Conclusion: the global health crisis caused a run on already sparse supply
The COVID demand surge is unique because potential customers cannot be guided by in-person sales staff toward the high-margin knife they want to sell. Indeed, retail sales of the same Solingen brands listed above have actually been strong even as their internet searches have declined - which is why you continue to find them in malls. So, absent retail staff, interested consumers turned online and the growth rates at chefknives illustrate that.Meanwhile, online communities have been building their following over years. Each community tends to have their favorite brands with some overlap, but this knowledge base tends to be built up over years and decades. That’s because trusted reviews are infrequent (we want more!) and consensus takes time to develop. As consumers turned online, they found communities recommending products already facing scarcity issues.
What do you get when combining exponential demand with a shift in consumer preferences for a relatively small market of available knives? A run on supply.
Part II: Supply cannot scale
High-end knife manufacturing is unlike low-end manufacturing
Low-end manufacturing is all about limiting cost and producing volume. Typically parts and processes must work together with high tolerance for error - imagine trying to grind a precise geometry when the heat treatment isn’t even and one portion of the knife abrades more quickly. So, there is almost always a tradeoff in performance for price and production at scale. Workers can be trained in a single task, such as soldering the tang to the blade or inspecting heat-treated batches of blade blanks. Many tasks may be automated altogether with humans only inspecting the results. When most Redditors think “mass production” they likely imagine this kind of manufacturing. Yet “mass production” doesn’t mean low-end by default.
Typical factory setting of Japanese knife manufacture. This particular factory produces both low and high-end knives
High-end knives can be similarly produced at volume, but the production process is more demanding. With higher performance requirements come lower tolerances for error and this means additional training for workers. Heat treatment must be more exacting so that grinds can fit within tighter parameters. This often requires cross-process knowledge so that the sharpener, forger, and metallurgist each understand and can identify minor discrepancies in the others’ processes. Sometimes the sharpener, forger, metallurgist, and polisher are the same person - though this is less common than marketers would like you to believe. Eventually, workers can specialize in a single aspect like polishing or forging and they become so good that others will solicit their services as part of their own process.
So in summary, high-end manufacturing requires more training. Some of that additional training is cross-disciplinary while some is highly specialized. In practice, this means working in various positions across production before settling into a specialty. All that additional training takes years, which is why apprenticeships and decades-long careers are the norm in high-end Japanese manufacturing.
There are limits on how quickly new workers can be trained
Now equipped with understanding of the training required for a high-end manufacturer, we’re ready to dive into the story of a Japanese bladesmith who we’ll call Kenji. It’s 2018 and he wants to scale up production rapidly.First a little bit more about Kenji. He didn’t start his career in bladesmithing - in fact, despite his city being famous for metalworking and knives, everybody told him that industry was moribund back in the 2000s when he went to university. So, he worked his first years designing heavy machinery before a family emergency unexpectedly brought him into the family business. Years later, he has grown into a management role for the production where he has two full-time employees plus an apprentice. One of those employees is the father of his childhood friend. The two families’ knife businesses merged several years ago.
Now it’s 2018 and Kenji is seeing demand skyrocket. He knows that even if production doubled, he would have a hard time meeting demand. So, how can he double production as quickly as possible while maintaining approximately equal product quality?
In short, he cannot. We’ve already covered how slow training can be, but hiring experienced workers to train them can be equally taxing. That employee whose child was schoolmates with Kenji? None of his sons went into knife making because they saw it as a dead end professionally. Similarly a generation of family businesses shrunk or died out and so Kenji was a dying breed when the market suddenly became hot. Even as knifemaking becomes a viable career once again, finding apprentices is not simple. Many are mindful that consumer interest could quickly return to apathy and such a career does not pay dividends for decades.
Kenji’s story is the norm in high-end Japanese production. Even at a breakneck pace, it will take him several years to double production. If the market should falter during this time, it would be disastrous for his business’ solvency.
Historical data for "Kenji"
| YEAR | EMPLOYEES | PIECES PRODUCED |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2 | 330 |
| 2015 | 2 | 310 |
| 2016 | 3 | 335 |
| 2017 | 3 | 440 |
| 2018 | 3 | 490 |
| 2019 | 5 | 570 |
| 2020 | 6 | 355 |
Ballpark numbers for the manufacturer Kenji manages. In mid-2018, he began subcontracting the majority of his sharpening and polishing labor and changed his product line to use more prefabricated steels. 2020 saw major business interruptions due to the COVID19 crisis.
Price increases are slowed by the business landscape
Meanwhile, the free market capitalists here on Reddit have been positively wetting themselves waiting to ask “why don’t the knife makers simply raise their prices?” The simple answer is that Japan’s economy is a free market economy in the same way choosing dinner as a family is a free market decision. Piss off your partner and you can guarantee you won’t get any dinner.Of course price increases have been happening over time, but slowly. Many makers are still fulfilling backorders - sellers swap stories about shipments arriving for orders placed years prior. Others are under obligations to sell via wholesalers or trade brokers who behave territorially when vendors or other middlemen encroach on their network. Finally, every maker is conscious of how their prices play into the overall landscape of colleagues and competition. Did you apprentice under another bladesmith? If so, what happens if you start selling your knives for more than him? What message would that send and how would he react?
The net effect of this is a market with unusually rigid prices and inflexible scalability. These problems are not intractable, but like all market shortcomings they require time to fix. Beginning in 2020, that time suddenly became equally scarce.
Conclusion: the global health crisis slowed production of an already scarce supply
As the world left the late 2010s, Japanese manufacturing was struggling to scale its production and downstream sellers began to slowly change pricing expectations to meet the new demand surge. Both changes were gradual if not energized - scarce supply was spurring young people into rejoining an industry long thought dead in Japan. Eager young apprentices began showing up to job openings in Sanjo, Seki, and Tokyo for the first time in generations.Then suddenly that already scarce supply lost crucial days of business production as Japan first began implementing workplace hygiene measures before entering a state of emergency from April until May. These along with other interruptions have severely hampered production capabilities during a time when the business pipeline could hardly afford it.
The run on supply that we explored at the end of Part I is different than the slow demand increases from the decade prior. Large manufacturers had time to expand operations into China and Indonesia while small manufacturers took on apprentices. OEM practices improved and producers were able to streamline their work over months and years. Everybody lagged a little behind with the promise that soon, supply would begin to scale as young apprentices became journeymen and then master smiths.
This run on supply caused a multiplier in demand as production scaled down. Manufacturers no longer lag slightly behind their orders - vendors are reporting it will take years for operations to recover and resume the same pace they had before.
Part III: What’s the future of kitchen knives?
Now we know why the knives are all gone and that the problem is unlikely to be resolved in a few extra months of production. So, what does the future hold for high-end knives? I will propose some educated guesses for what happens over the coming years.Either Japanese manufacturing practices will scale and expand their industry or else interest will move on - potentially to China, Indonesia, and Vietnam
The Japanese market is already being eaten from both ends. At the very high end, we’re witnessing the rise of custom makers in the US and Europe whose individual pieces command price tags well into the “collectible” range for Japanese knives. Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturing is eating into the bottom range of Japan’s knife market with Indonesia and Vietnam closing in. Some of this movement is driven by Japanese companies who outsource low-end manufacturing, but it’s likely that jobs continue to move offshore en masse.The key question is whether Japanese manufacturing can scale quickly enough to preserve their market share at the $100-500 range. The domestic Japanese market likely needs 10-20 years to scale up production. The question is whether foreign manufacturing needs this long to capture market share, even if Japan does manage to scale up eventually. The past five years have seen neighboring countries scaling up their production quality and doubling quantity every few years, so things are not looking great for the domestic Japanese market. Here is a predictive model based on the past five years of growth.
Predicted model of market share after 15 years wherein Japan doubles production while China, Indonesia, and Vietnam each double every 3-5 years.
Today’s most popular knife fads will be replaced by new ones
One thing we haven’t mentioned until now are the hangers-on of high-end knives. For example, the prolific Sakai Takayuki VG-10 damascus knives are streamlined imitators of more expensive knives like Anryu or Yu Kurosaki. They take certain aspects like the hammered (tsuchime) finish and suminagashi pattern and build the knife around them, allowing the knife to spread more quickly because of the reduced prices.Yet there are even more extreme imitators coming out of China and Southeast Asia who move faster and are less scrupulous about marketing. They flood Facebook with ads featuring shiny damascus blades with handles so colorful it looks like an M&M mass murder. These companies move massive volume before customers grow wise and thus hasten the lifetime of the fad. For some, it’s an educational experience. For others, they’re just happy they scratched the itch.
At any rate, movement like this eventually spells the end of one consumer taste to be replaced with another. So, I predict that the current fads (VG-10 damascus, hammered finishes, serbian chef knives) will soon fade and be replaced by others. One way this prediction might come to pass is that two years from now semi-scam companies will start advertising cheap cu mai (five layer steel with a stripe of nickel) offerings instead of their current Sakai Takayuki imitations. Or maybe it will be a faux kasumi finish or etched core stainless-clad instead.
Successful manufacturers will begin to partner with small, non-Japanese makers to innovate in their designs and production
Zwilling has already done this with Bob Kramer once, so why not again? The most popular U.S. custom makers are struggling to produce at volume, so these partnerships could solve the problem from both ends. I predict we’ll soon see some version of Wüsthof releasing a line of Maumasi-designed blades or Victorinox licensing Don Nguyen’s handles.This will, of course, come with challenges. Knife enthusiasts mostly have bitter tastes in their mouths with the memory of the Shun Ken Onion and members of the forum here have pointed out that ZKramers struggle to produce consistently good geometries. I don’t necessarily predict these partnerships will produce good high-end knives.
Conclusion
The knives are, indeed, all gone. And that’s unlikely to change for the near future. The brand you desperately want to come back into stock will continue to face shortage issues for years and may never come back at all. But that’s okay.Instead, newcomers will soon replace the current favorites. Five years from now, the most sought-after knives will have diversified and new names will replace the old ones slowly. In the past five years, those new names have mostly been Japanese. I suspect the new ones may not be.
Until then, may the back in stock notifications be ever in your favor.
