Well we’d better start telling our story, before it’s too late and we all start to forget or exaggerate or something else. Don’t worry I won’t bore you with too many details suffice to say as with any launch we’ve had our trials and tribulations, but it’s been quite a ride so far. Truth is we’ve all come at this with our own agenda, who doesn't so this part of the story is from my side… too bad the rest of you can write your own stories.
We lived in Italy, with a stunning seaside view in the hot and Roman town of San Felice Circeo, we knew it couldn’t last forever, so we made a plan. I was designing websites for many people around the world and figured it was time to try my hand at doing our own project. Meanwhile back in the UK my sister and her husband had been thinking about a new project, Damian struck upon Ceramic Knives in his travels and thought most of them were either too low in quality and broke too easily or too high end and out of reach for most people, with considerable market research there really was a gap in the market.
But you know how it is - there are always more reasons and the reasons for Rocknife began to inspire and conspire - we moved back to the UK, I was working out of Damians’ office, my wife began an Amazon business that was doing well, we could sell Rocknives on that, Tom our marketing man was coming up with Dinner Party ideas for viral videos and it was all a lot of fun. The miracle came when we realise that we could actually get these made. Its one thing to think of designs and discuss coloured handles, it’s another thing to realise we hadn’t all argued too much about money, design, size, logistics, how’s, why’s, wherefores and all the rest.
Yet we still had to wait… There were delays in the manufacturing processes, would the ceramic knives be sharp enough, some of the samples where dubious and we looked up videos on YouTube about paper cutting tests and realised more and more that there were others in the market with similar ideas to us. Then there was the website to be built, fresh back from foreign travels I was particularly busy with other client’s websites, would I have time to make a website for Rocknife before the knives arrived, it was looking touch and go. But hard work, late nights and weekends later the website took shape and came together. The rest of the team were thinking up viral videos, I was swimming in 37 different descriptions of essentially the same thing - a ceramic knife. I was literally running out of vegetables and fruit to cut. Madeleine has done all the photography ages ago (albeit on the sample knives), but now we had a final photo-shoot for the life style shots, I think that was the point when it started to finally take shape.
The old adage a photo speaks a thousand words was certainly true in this case. Suddenly the knives were made and sitting in our office, it wasn’t like a few at a time or some of these or some of those, it was all at once, wham, we were off. The website by hook and by crook started working and we gave away a lot of accidental free delivery and a few people also struggled to pay, but with a couple of days of fixes and checks our first Guinae pig customers managed to place their orders. It’s been a triumph, we all knew fundamentally that these knives would sell themselves, they are fantastic to touch, beautiful to hold, stunning to look at and work precisely as expected, there’ve sharper than we could have hoped. Our story isn’t over - there’s lots more in the pipeline, so welcome to the adventure.
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