CRESCENT Products: At SARGE Knives, the Riches are in the Niches.
Matt Morris and his father Gene aren’t like “Crocodile” Dundee, but they can still look at you and say definitively, “That’s not a knife. THAT’s a knife.” They can because it’s a subject they talk about daily from their Greer, SC-based SARGE Knives. Located in a nondescript building near the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, Gene, Matt, and several other family members operate a successful slate of family businesses that include the SARGE brand.
With a product line that includes pocket knives, tactical blades, upscale specialty knives, hunting and fishing knives, a bone-handled oyster knife, and even knives designed by award-winning designer Tom Kreger, Matt and Gene know their blades. They recently sat down with CRESCENT to talk about the cutlery designed right here in the heart of the Southeast.
While we waited for Gene to finish with an unexpected appointment, Matt began sharing the SARGE story. It wasn’t only impressive. It was at one point a little intimidating. Read on, and you’ll understand why.
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Well, we’ve been in business for almost ten years and it’s almost kind of started off by accident, like a lot of companies. One of our other companies that we own and operate is a manufacturer’s rep company, mostly in the construction and industrial supplies. We’re looking for items that we can use to promote our other lines that we represented so we started putting together knife promotions to help sell ladders and extension cords as part of our other company. Then we started thinking “We need to develop our own company for something that we can control and grow.” And we had these connections in the knife world so we put together this product line and started it about ten years ago. So we’re still relatively young and we developed a business plan and it’s been great. It’s fun looking back where we started and where we’re at today and we try to specialize in the niche market that’s not as crowded with all the different other knife manufacturers. We do a lot with a lot of the wildlife groups with their own fundraising activities that they use, that they do. We do a lot through the Boy Scouts of America, we’re a licensee for them. We do big business and promotional products for corporations, logo knives as promotional items for themselves. We do have a large retail business mainly in the hardware industry. Like your True Value and ACE hardware and your mom-and-pop hardware stores all across the country. We’ve got countertop displays that we make up for those types of customers, as well.
But you also have the upscale retailers, too.
Yeah, that’s been kind of our newest channel that we’ve started to pursue is the specialty gift stores and the high-end men’s clothing stores. We’re now marketing for groomsmen’s gifts for the tuxedo rental places and that’s just not a typical channel that we see knife companies marketing toward so that’s kind of what I mean when I say we try to specialize in the niche markets. My dad, it’s one of his little sayings, “The riches are in the niches.” So that kind of been our plan. Like we’ve got one of the girls I work with here, she’s at a camp trade show where organizers and administrators from all over the country come to the show and we’ll show them knives that they can customize with their camp name to sell in their gift shops and stuff like that. We’re doing that this week. Next week, we’ll be at a club managers’ trade show for like golf course club managers. We’ll show them a selection of items they can customize for member/guest tournaments and different tee gifts and tournament gifts that they can use. Again, that’s another niche business, the golf course industry.
Did you do anything at the Southeast Wildlife Expo this year?
Yeah, actually, we did. Debby Jacobs, who I work with, set up in somebody’s gift store down there. It was kind of a last-minute deal. We did the Atlanta Gift Mart this year. It was our first time having a booth in Atlanta at the Gift Mart, and somebody from the Charleston area said “South Carolina Wildlife Expo is this weekend. Would you like to come and set up in my store and sell your product?” It kind of came together at the last minute.
The thing we try to with SARGE…when we started the company, we saw an opportunity for a good quality, well-made, value-priced knife. It seemed like you either had the high end knives that were either specialty type knives or collectible knives. Then you had the low end, kind of disposable throw-away knives. You didn’t see a lot of well-made value-priced knives so that’s where we try to position ourselves.
And that seems to be the response. Product reviews are pretty consistent. “Durable. Can be put through anything. Should last a lifetime if you take care of it.”
And that’s exactly the market we’re trying to hit. We’re looking at, for example, a kid at a camp. Not everybody can afford to pay $40 or $50 for a pocket knife for a camp and we want to let that child have the opportunity to buy that knife for $15 to $20. It’s the same with the Boy Scouts and stuff. Until we got the Boy Scout license, the Boy Scout knives were, every one that I saw, $40 to $50 range. Not everybody can afford to buy their son a knife like that. With the hardware channel, we wanted to have a knife that guys could use on anything they wanted to. They wouldn’t have to want to use their knife and “this might mess up my blade. I’m not sure I’m going to do this.” Or worry about whether they are going to lose it or anything like that. You’ve got a good knife and if you do something you’re not supposed to do with it and mess up the blade, it’s not the end of the world. If you accidentally lose it, it’s not that big of a loss. It’s just something that you can buy that’s going to hold up like it’s supposed to and you don’t have a whole lot invested in it.
How’d you decide on putting everything in Greer?
Well, this is where our other businesses were based and one of the advantages we had when we started the company was that we had all the infrastructure already in place. We had the warehouse facility, we had the staff in place, all the administrative people in place, customer service. So we share all the overhead with our other companies. We grew up in the area. My dad grew up in Dunean Mill village here in Greenville so I grew up here. It’s just home for us.
No plans on going anywhere else?
No, no. I don’t see us changing at all. If you think about it, Greenville is such an ideal location to service the Southeast. You’re two hours from Atlanta. You’re an hour and a half from Charlotte. You’re next-day UPS to just about all of the Southeast area. Although, we sell all over the country, we feel that Greenville is a really good location for any company.
You were recently quoted as saying, “An established mature market such as the knife industry is very challenging to come up with totally original ideas.” How are you facing that challenge and continuing to develop new products? What goes into that new product development?
What we try to do is we attend all the trade shows. We try to listen to the customers and ask them what they’re looking for. We observe what they’re buying. What are the current trends? Are there any opportunities for…are people looking for something they’re not currently seeing? We try to talk to the people at the trade shows we go to. We talk to all our hunting people that we’re in contact with through the wildlife groups that we do business with…like Ducks Unlimited, National Wild Turkey Federation. We just ask a lot of questions, and that kind of shows us what’s the need out in the marketplace. Then there’s a lot of creative people that are knife makers, that design knives, and you try to do things in a different way. One of the latest ones that we’re working on is a new locking mechanism that nobody’s ever seen before. One of the popular trends in the knife industry now is this assisted-opening blades where some either spring-loaded or some kind of lever system that makes the blade pop out. Our locking system that we’re developing is not to lock the blade in the open position as to lock it in the closed position so it doesn’t accidentally spring open while it’s in your pocket.
Like a safety.
Like a safely, yeah. That’s currently kind of going through the patent process now and, as we grow our line, we’re more conscious of developing more unique things that are unique to SARGE. A lot of knives out there, they all look really similar, it’s just a different brand on the knife. So, as we grow, we’re trying to distinguish ourselves with some unique features that we can’t find on other peoples knives. I look at it as kind of as part of the growth cycle of the company. You establish yourself by offering…in the beginning, you offer them your knives that look familiar to them, but they may not be familiar with your name but you win them over by a quality product with a value price. Then, once they become familiar with your name, you can start developing more unique things that are exclusive to your line. That’s the approach we’ve taken. As we’ve become more knowledgeable about the knife industry, we start to see things that you can do better, that don’t exist out there right now. A good example is…just from talking to a lot of people that do duck hunting…a lot of time they have these waders on, so they can’t get to their pockets or anything so we’re developing this neck knife which wasn’t anything new necessarily, but you mainly saw it at tactical, self-defense world. You didn’t see a neck knife that was designed for hunters. So we kind of changed the blade shape and made a few other modifications to one of these tactical-style knives made into a hunter’s neck knife. That’s really got some good responses and it seems like it is going to be a nice new product for us.
How often do you retire a design? Are there certain designs that are permanent fixtures? You say, “There’s one that we do so well that it’s our signature,” or, “This is the one that everybody wants.”
Yeah, most of the times we retire a knife is when we see a way to improve upon a knife that’s currently in our line. We want to replace it with something that’s better than what we’re currently offering or we decide this looks too close to a knife that somebody else is doing and we want to make a little more separation from one of our competitors. Our goal would be to have all knives be considered as signature-type knives but, unfortunately, you don’t hit a home run every time. You may have a knife you love, you think you’re going to sell them like crazy but, for some reason, the marketplace just doesn’t really grab hold of it like you thought they would. Once you see something’s not going to be a good seller, for whatever reason, you may just phase it out and try something different.
So it winds up on the plane with the t-shirts of the team that didn’t win the Super Bowl?
Right. So we’ve kind of got a process in place to…as we decide to retire knives, how to transition them over to closeout. We end up taking them to hunting, gun and knife shows…there are different channels we use to phase those knives out. We try to review our line and see if there are some things we can improve upon and it is neat that we have recognized there are certain knives in our line now that we say, “These are going to be around for a long time.” They’re like signature knives for us.
What would those be?
I think the newest ones are…we kind of developed a family of these ergonomic handle hunting-style knives so it’s almost like a family of knives we developed for hunting and fishing side with this line and with this (pulling out a giant machete)…
Um. That’s a heck of a knife.
Yeah, that’s brand new for us, as well, but see these filet knives? See how they have these ergonomic handles? We feel like this is going to be a signature piece for us. One of our newest lines is this “Black & White” series.
We kind of developed it with the specialty gift stores and the groomsmen’s gifts in mind. You kind of have the tuxedo feel and already it’s been really well-received and I think it’s going to be a part of our line for quite some time.
I’ve been a groomsman at several weddings and you seem to get the same type thing for groomsman gifts like a little flask or something like a key chain. Nobody’s ever going to be mad about getting a good pocket knife, especially if it is personalized with your initials on it. I think it’s going to be a really nice piece. From all the store owners that we’ve talked to, they’ve said they just don’t have a lot of choices when it comes to men’s gifts. Where, on the women’s side, there are like catalogs and catalogs of stuff but, when it comes to men’s gifts, they don’t see a lot of options so I think it is going to be a nice, nice piece.
Stay tuned for Part 2.
