LynchNW Blog

Read About LynchNW

LynchNW's story began like many other small businesses do - an idea, and not much else. My first nice knife - a Spyderco PM2 - led down the rabbit trail of wanting to ‘make it my own’ by modifying it in some way.  The family budget was too tight to spend much money on anything extravagant, so I decided a simple titanium clip was what my knife couldn’t live without. But even those were more than I could justify spending - at that time, $40 (what they cost from a maker called STR) was out of my reach. That hard realization led me to wonder - could I possibly figure out how to get a titanium clip made?  If I could find someone to make them for me so I could try to sell them, I could use that money to fund my ‘knife habit’. I came up with a design, and sent out the drawing to 60 machine shops, some local, most not.  I got back 59 ‘No Quotes’.

But a Washington-state based shop threw me a bone, and graciously agreed to produce the initial run - 100 clips, if I remember correctly. I used up our family savings to pay for them, and posted the clips on BladeForums to see if anyone might possibly be interested. To my amazement (and everlasting gratitude to the good people on that site, some of whom are still customers), the clips sold. When I came back to the machine shop for the second batch, they let me know that the manufacturing process was much more difficult than they had anticipated, and so the cost of the next run would need to jump up significantly. Since I didn’t have the additional funds to make that happen, it left me with a single option - try to figure out how to make them myself.

After heaps of trial and error and more trial and more error, learning and failing and scrapping and trying again, hunched over a workbench in the dirt-floor basement of our old farmhouse, the process slowly evolved. Following what seemed like an eternity of making bad parts, I had the first small batch of good ones. I suppose at this point I had what could be loosely called a ‘business’ - making, finishing, and shipping titanium clips from my rural home.  Like everyone else with a side hustle, I was working a full time job and spending my evenings and weekends making and shipping and trying to figure it out.  Time passed - 3 or 4 years I guess - and it finally got to the point that I was having a hard time carving out enough hours to get parts out the door. After a lot of prayer and sleepless nights, I took the terrifying step of quitting my ‘Real Job’ - our family’s sole source of income - and moving into a small 300 square foot space for rent in my hometown of Rockford, Washington. To say the building was rundown would not be doing it justice - the wood floor had holes in it that you could fall through, there wasn’t any insulation or heat, and the bathroom had no walls. But it was a ‘real shop’!

I worked there a couple years, and during that time added the first of the LynchNW crew.  That was scary, let me tell you.  I wasn’t sure I could support my own family, let alone anyone else.  Thomas, then Kaden, then Taden, then Daisy.  Adding talented, competent people to offset my shortcomings made all the difference in that first stretch.  But that 300 square foot space filled up quick!