Hey everyone - hope you had an excellent holiday season. We spent Christmas with our extended family, then spent New Year's in Branson with Melody, the kiddos, and my parents. I landed back in town on 1/3 ready to hit the ground running...and then spent the next seven days in bed with one of the worst colds I've had in a while!
I'm finally up and running and trying to get caught up, but I wanted to take a second to give everyone an update on Snarf. I placed the order and paid the deposit just before the holidays, so we've got the ball rolling there and are currently on track for a June delivery.
We did hit one pretty significant financial snag that I wanted you to be aware of. It turns out there was a misunderstanding regarding the quote that we received from the manufacturer, so once we actually went to place the order we discovered that each knife is actually going to cost us about $6 more than we had planned. That doesn't sound like much, but based on our minimum order quantity per colorway, that's $20K more than we had budgeted for.
Although we are still stoked about the record-breaking $118K we raised for this project, the amount we actually received after taxes and fees was $94K, so that extra $20K was quite the gut punch. In the interest of transparency, everyone involved really shoulders some of the burden here. When the first ballpark quote was received the knife was not completely finalized. When I received the prototypes I reached out to Laura (my direct contact at Scikio) to ask about a new quote from Frank (the factory owner) the communication led Laura to believe she had communicated that we were still waiting on a quote from Frank and led me to believe the ballpark quote was the final quote. Then Frank didn't get around to sending Laura an updated quote until after I placed the order, so it wasn't until then that we all realized the mistake.
Crazy as it may seem, the $6 increase represents a pretty serious discount that Frank is giving us for the mistake, and although it amounts to a huge chunk of change, I've worked with Laura and Frank enough (and met with them personally enough) to know that they're doing their best to produce the knives at the best price without losing money on their end.
Of course all of this won't have any impact on the amount you paid for Snarf. But once I get the late backer site set up, there will be an increase on the price for Snarf for late backers, and another increase once we have all the preorders shipped and we start selling them in stock. I just didn't want you to see those price increases and thing we were getting greedy - just trying to make up for a major miscommunication/miscalculation!
Melody and I are heading to Vegas this weekend to celebrate our 21st anniversary and meet with Laura while she's in town for SHOT Show, so we'll likely have more updates once we return. I actually met Laura originally at SHOT Show back in 2023 when she introduced me to what would eventually be known as the Roundhouse Lock. So she's basically been a part of AKT from the beginning so it'll be nice to reconnect with her in person and plan out more designs for 2026. It helps that she's about as crazy as Melody and I are as demonstrated in the photo of a company retreat she sent me (she's the horizontal one)!
I hope to get the late backer site up and running in the next few weeks. This will give you the opportunity to finalize your order, add anything new, and give us your shipping info. So keep a lookout for that coming soon!
As always, thank you so much for backing Snarf. I went full-time with AKT just before we launched Snarf, so I definitely waited with bated breath to see if Snarf was going to be my first failure or success now that AKT is my main day job. So thank you so much for bringing Snarf to life and signaling to us that you want to see more of what's in store for AKT!
