20 Years of Helping People Sharpen Better

About 20 years ago, I realized I had a problem.

I enjoy cooking and I enjoy woodworking. I had good tools and nice knives. I used them regularly. But when they got dull, I didn’t really know what to do about it. As I started figuring it out, I realized something pretty quick. This wasn’t just my problem.

A lot of people were in the same position. They had good knives, good tools, but no clear path to keeping them sharp. That’s where Sharpening Supplies came from.

Getting Started

In 2006, there wasn’t much out there when it came to sharpening. You might find a couple stones at a woodworking store, or a knife sharpener in a homewares store. But there wasn’t one place that brought everything together. And there definitely wasn’t any guidance.

So the idea was simple: create a place where people could find good sharpening tools and get help understanding how to use them.

We started in a small rented room in a business incubator. No windows. A loading dock at the top of a steep ramp where every shipment had to be carried up by hand.

It wasn’t glamorous.

We started with a couple of product lines, mainly DMT and Norton, and figured things out as we went.

The first month went okay. The second month, sales dropped to almost nothing. There was a real point where I wasn’t sure if this was going to work at all. But we kept going.

I started writing articles. We added more products. I even made some early videos (which  weren’t very good) and little by little, things started to pick up.

The First Real Signs It Might Work

There’s one moment I still remember. UPS came to pick up orders one day, and for the first time, the cart was full. Half of it was stacked with boxes of the Work Sharp WS-3000. That doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it was a big deal.

Up until then, it had just been me and my wife Colleen doing everything, packing orders, answering phones, building the website, all of it.

In 2008, we hired our first long-term employees, Sam and Darren. They’re both still with us today. That was when it started to feel like this could become something more than just a small operation.

What Shaped the Business

From the beginning, one thing mattered more than anything else: helping the customer.

That came from my first job out of school. If a customer was on hold, a bell would ring, and everyone, including the president, would stop what they were doing to answer the phone. It wasn’t efficient, but it made the priority clear.

That stuck with me.

We’ve tried to carry that into everything we do here. If someone calls with a question, we take the time to talk it through. If something isn’t working, we try to figure out why. Sharpening can be frustrating when you’re starting out. I remember that feeling. So we try to make it a little easier.

What I’ve Learned Along the Way

Over the years, we’ve added a lot, more brands, more products, even our own line of sharpening tools. But most of what I’ve learned hasn’t come from the products. It’s come from customers.

When you hear the same questions over and over, you start to see patterns. And those patterns push you to test things, to try different approaches, to find better answers.

One example that stuck with me was a customer who sent in a D2 knife he’d been told couldn’t be sharpened. So I gave it a try using diamond stones. It took a long time, longer than I expected, but it sharpened.

That experience reinforced something I still believe:

Most sharpening problems aren’t impossible. They just take the right approach.

What Hasn’t Changed

We still believe in taking the time to help people understand what they’re doing. We still answer questions. We still try to help people choose the right tools for their situation.

And we still believe sharpening should feel approachable, not intimidating.

Looking Ahead

We’re still learning. Still testing. Still trying to get better. And we’re still focused on the same goal we started with:

Helping people sharpen better.

If you’ve been part of that in any way, whether you’ve bought something from us, called with a question, or just spent time learning alongside us, thank you.

To celebrate, we offering 20% Off all Sharpening Supplies brand sharpening stones and strops.

Here's to the next 20 years.