The Ambition Project – Calgary Entrepreneurial Podcast

The Ambition Project is a video series in which we interview successful and ambitious Calgary entrepreneurs and talk to them about their struggles, what they’ve had to overcome on their journey and valuable insights they have to share with up and coming business owners. The series will premiere on September 18th, 2018. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay updated or stream an episode on Spotify or iTunes.

Jonathan Hafichuk: Welcome Kevin, thank you for taking the time to do this today.I’m really excited to find out more about all these projects you have on the go. 

Kevin Kent: Thanks for having me man. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So Kevin Kent is the owner and founder of Knifewear which is a chain of very high-end knife stores and Kent of Inglewood, and you just released a book as well.So do you want to tell us a little bit about the knife store to start and then we’ll go into Kent of Inglewood and then the book? 

Kevin Kent: Yeah sure, so it all started with, ok let’s back up, I’m a chef, I’ve been a chef my whole like it’s all I know how to do and I was living in London, England and there I tried a Japanese knife one day. I went to a chef convention and this guy had a few knives and all of these are handmade knives from Japan, and I said those are ridiculously expensive, I keep my knives razor-sharp and he went oh ok, try mine. You know when you’re using a knife and it’s not so sharp and you kind of to saw through a tomato so I was kind of doing that and it went right through and stuck in the board and I went What! So you know that moment you got a Toyota Corolla and you think that’s a really great car and then you go and drive a BMW M3 and you go that’s a different kind of car at that moment right, and eventually, I swapped over my knives over to Japanese knives and when I came back to Canada 9 years later, 8 years later there was no knives in the whole country I was interested in buying so I just made a contact in Japan imported a few knives. My plan was, you know that guy in college that would sell weed to buy weed? My plan was to sell knives to buy a few more knives because I wanted to open a restaurant. It kind of got out of control there and now we’ve got six Knifewear stores across Canada. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Wow, and then what is Kent of Inglewood? 

Kevin Kent: Well Kent of Inglewood came because I like to say yes to people. So customers would come in and say oh you’ve got the best Japanese knives in the world, can you get a Japanese straight razor? And I said yeah sure, I know the guy we can do this and then we got brushes, and then we got shaving soaps, we got European razors, we have safety razors and all the guys that would work in the shop at the time, we all tried them and I was like oh my god this is the best saver I’ve ever had in my life, clearly ie missed a spot now, its a renewable resource right. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: And you sell beard oil too now right? 

Kevin Kent: Yeah so Kent of Inglewood ,what happened ,we ended up having accidentally a little men’s grooming store in the back of our knife store and it had to get out because we had created a problem. People used to love coming to the knife store because it was fun and they can hang out and take their time and find a knife but when Kent of Inglewood started getting popular, there were times when you couldn’t get into our store, there were people outside waiting to come inside and it had become so popular that we had ruined the shopping experience for everybody so we finally said okay enough of this, you have to leave whatever you are and we realized this is called Kent Of Inglewood, one of our one of our guys named it that and I liked it so we picked it up and signed a lease across the street and then we say at Kent Of Inglewood, we get you dirty and we get you clean. We get you dirty because we sell axes and campfire equipment and cooking over fire stuff so you know when you spend a weekend camping, you’ve standing around a fire and chopping wood and when you get home you have the best shower of your life so we get you dirty with all that kind of outdoor fun stuff and then we get you clean with the soaps and shaving and pomades and the beard gear and all of that. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Very cool, So how do you pick products for Kent of Inglewood? Like how do you pick the beard oils?, like obviously the knives you have suppliers in Japan and stuff. 

Kevin Kent: It’s the same kind of curation process for everything we get samples, we try things out ourselves and the thing is we only want to carry undeniably better products so that experience I had with the knife in 1999 where I cut with a Japanese knife and went holy moly, that’s way better, we want all of our product to have that experience, so when people use them they go, okay this is an undeniably better product, makes our job easier. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Right.

Kevin Kent: Selling great stuff is way easier than selling garbage that you don’t believe in. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: For sure, tell us a little bit about the book that you just published. 

Kevin Kent: Well that’s kind of a knock-on from the films we made the two from Spring Hammer that focussed on our blacksmith in Japan that we deal with and the book was kind of an offshoot that we always want to have a really good Japanese kitchen knife book in the shop but nobody really wrote one that was right for us so we said okay let’s write it ourselves and we know that our customers want to know more about the blacksmith ad I’ve got a really good relationship with these guys I go to Japan two or three times a year these are friends of mine now so I go and make knives with them, I go and sharpen knives with them, we drink sake and sing karaoke and it’s fun and I wanted to kind of pull back the curtain and let our customers meet the men who make the knives so it’s partly that and then partly like the last third of the book last hundred pages is really the nuts and bolts of probably the top 50 questions people ask us in the shop, like how do you sharpen a knife? how do I choose a knife? what’s a knife set or what the right knife set for me? Tell me about Damascus steel, you know why is steel important, all those kind of questions are answered at the end of the book as well, so the front half, the first two-thirds is the romance and beautiful photography by a local photographer, he nailed it and shoots in medium format Pentax camera and these pictures are brilliant. So the book looks great at the very least. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Yeah, ill have to check that book out, that would be cool. 

Kevin Kent: Yeah you have to. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So it all kind of started, you said you were an accidental entrepreneur it all kind of started when you were selling the knives out of your backpack you tried the Japanese knife you’re still a chef then correct? 

Kevin Kent: Yeah I was still a chef, tried a Japanese knife, switched all my knives to Japanese, moved back to Canada, my plan was to open a restaurant eventually that’s what I really wanted to do, so I guess I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to have my own business but I just didn’t know it was going to be two retail chains and then a small media company where we’re publishing books and films and well we got a secret book coming out too, hopefully, it makes it here before Christmas but I think we have dropped the ball on that, unfortunately. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Can you tell us anything more about that one? 

Kevin Kent: Its the secret book.you’ll find out soon enough. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Cool. So how did you go from selling the knives to the store? What did that transition look like? 

Kevin Kent: Everything just seems to grow organically for us, so I was working as a chef and I had all these knives at my house, tons of them, maybe 12 and different chefs around town knew I had knives. Cause they’d call me up and be like hey Kevin, can u come to the shop I want to see some of your knives and I said ok, stuffed them all in my backpack, jump on my bike, cycle down and sit at a table like this at a restaurant and sometimes in the loading bay or sometimes in the office if they had an office and we’d talk about the knives, sell a few knives that way and really it wasn’t my pan to have a knife store, somebody wrote an article in the Calgary Herald, it was one of these articles that was this big, Kevin Kent sous chef at this restaurant has Japanese knives here’s his cellphone number, and my phone starts ringing, about November, December, in Calgary and people want to get some Christmas gifts and they’re excited about handmade knives and my phone is ringing off the hook, I’m getting like 15 calls a day and people saying “where’s your store?I want to come by” I say I don’t have a store, I had people coming to my house, I was meeting people in their offices, I fill in Sebastian’s coffee shop, I used to use one of the tables back when they were at the old Calgary farmers market, at Cree barracks and I would slightly sit at a table with my inventory in a bag beside me and people would agree to meet me there and, oh someone at 10o o’clock is coming sid pull up my business card and just leave it on the table,so I didn’t have a stall there so I kind of had a clandestine secret store at the farmers. We have a real farmers market stall now, one for Calgary on for Inglewood and one for Knifewear now, were legit ow. But for a long time, it was just the secret store. It seems to take off and that was the end of July 2007 and by January I thought, let’s make this happen so we rented a storage locker, like we rented the closet of a little grocery store that was in Inglewood so I had a 10 foot by 12-foot room, but a couple of cases in, put a couple of knives on the wall, had some knives, I bumped up my inventory this time quite a bit. I had maybe 20 or 30 knives at this point, maybe even 40, everybody thought it was the lunchroom for the staff because you had to go to the back of the store and kind of go around a corner and look in and get the courage to come in the room, it started to really take off we had become pretty popular, we were there for about 8 months before we realized we had to have a bigger space. So by January the following year, so 2009,e moved into what I call my megastore, which is the Inglewood store we have now. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Wow, very cool. 

Kevin Kent: So that’s how we got there, did that answer your question? 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Yeah absolutely. So I was really excited to do this interview because my first job as an adult was selling knives, I sold Cutco knives for three years, worked in management for a little bit in the lower end of the business, so quality knives has always been something that interesting to me, when I go to a friends house and have the really cheap plastic ones and you’re trying to saw through things it’s just terrible. 

Kevin Kent: A terrible knife, makes cooking a terrible choree, it’s not fun 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Yeah, so obviously Cutco doesn’t compare to what you guys sell, 

Kevin Kent: The big difference is Japanese knives are made with harder steel. A much harder steel means they’re going to stay sharp longer and it means we can make them sharper it also means that when you look at them because quite a lot of our knives are really beautiful, when you look at them you kind of go ah I love this knife, I feel inspired. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: How much difference can you tell between one of those kinds of knives and something like a high-end Hinkles or Wusthof? 

Kevin Kent: They’re very very different, I think Japanese knives are more like a Ferrari, super fast built to be really fast but it’s not built to be rugged. European knives or Cutco knives are really built to be rugged but I would argue that they are never really sharp. They’re like a 4 by 4, it’s handy to have a 4 by 4 in your kitchen but we like the really fast ones. So those are the Japanese knives they’re just sharper and stay sharp longer. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So with typical use, how often do you need to sharpen them? 

Kevin Kent: That’s a hard question, most people don’t sharpen their knives. Most people don’t go out and get their knives sharpened, with typical use one or two years they can come back to us if they wanted to keep their German knife, that level of sharp it’ll probably be six to eight months. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Ok very interesting and what is the process look like for making those knives, is it layers of steel? 

Kevin Kent: Yes and no, this is a big question here so when I get really boring just give me a signal. Basically, the way a Japanese knife is built they put a hard piece of steel down the center and then they wrap softer steel around the outside and that is to protect it because the steel is so hard, for example, if it wasn’t wrapped to the softer steel, if you dropped on the ground it would just break right, because this here this is really hard this is super hard stuff but it’s not strong it will break if you drop it but if we wrap it in rubber and drop it, better chance it’ll survive so that’s what the Japanese do and I know it sounds silly that you say oh softer steel and harder steel what are you talking about man, steel is hard, but there’s degrees. so step one, if you’re a blacksmith you would either buy a bar of steel that’s already laminated with those three steels or you would make it yourself. Put down one piece of steel, you get your 3 pieces of steel hot, put down the soft steel, put flux on, put the hard steel on, more flux which is Like a powder that melts and cleans the steel so you don’t get corrosion between the pieces and then put the next piece on like a little sandwich, stick that in the fire and then just hammer it to death. That forge welds the 3 pieces together and then from there you start stretching it out, making it into a nice shape, perfect the shape of the knife either through a punch or forming it by hammer or forming it by like a strange cutting machine they have, and then you would heat treat it, which is you know quenching tempering and kneeling which is 3 processes to get the steel hard but also to make it tough as well, and then you would polish it, grind the sides so it has an edge, do a final sharpening, more polish, engrave the name, but the handle on, stick it in a box and send it to Canada. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So how long does the process typically take? 

Kevin Kent: The fastest I’ve ever made a knife from start to finish was 8 hours but I didn’t anneal it properly because that genuinely takes 3 to 4 days, so you see it on forge and on fire and the reason a lot of those knives break is because they didn’t have the time to do it properly, there are ways to get around it but if you wanted to do it really well, it would take you more time. But its a TV show, it’s fun. I never really asked anybody but nobody ever starts one process with one knife and goes from start to finish, what they’ll do is they’ll say ok I’m going to make 90 sandwiches of steel today and then I’ll take those 90 and hammer them into a Shanktoku shape. So there’s processes and you kind of just walk it through. The Mortakas for example, are a family that I’ve been working with that makes kitchen knives by hand but they’ve been working as blacksmiths for this family since 1293. Right? So for 720 years, they’ve been a blacksmithing family they started as swords and then everything but now they only make kitchen knives but they can trace their lineage back through 27 generations of blacksmiths which is amazing, there’s three of them who work full-time blacksmiths and I think they used to have one part-time guy and I think they have two part-time guys now ad they can do about 300 knives in a month. But they’re fast. Not everybody can do that level of production with that few people, they’re quick, 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Incredible, So when you first started out, when you first opened your door, what challenges from an entrepreneurial standpoint came along with opening the store initially? 

Kevin Kent: All of them. Every single challenges happened I think business is all about challenges it’s the nature of it. Its how you deal with the challenges, I had no retail experience, I’ve never had a retail job, so I suppose that could be a challenge, I don’t speak Japanese very well so that makes things tough, probably our biggest challenge is when we started out because we bootstrapped everything, I’ve never had outside funding so I started this business with 8000$. So we started the business with 8000$ 11 years ago and now even got 11 stores across Canada. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: When you first got your big store in Inglewood… 

Kevin Kent: Oh my god I was terrified, I had to pay them 2000$ a month for rent forever, for 5 years for the rest of my life as far as I could tell. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: I imagine it’s a little bit more now. 

Kevin Kent: Some landlords are better than others. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So did you ever have months where you were worried that you weren’t going to make rent? 

Kevin Kent: Yes but I worked really hard in the early days like I was doing restaurant consulting, I was doing menu writing, I was helping people switch their restaurant from one concept to another, I was doing mobile sharpening, So I was going out and sharpening at different stores, I was writing articles for magazines, I was doing anything to make ends meet. So yeah there was always that constant fear because I had to make money right from the beginning because I didn’t have another job. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So was it that fear that inspired your work ethic or was it passion? 

Kevin Kent: Serious work ethic just came from being a chef. As a chef you have tons of deadlines to meet every hour, some of them are within minutes of each other and you don’t get to go home until the day is over. So I think coming from that environment that was super high octane was really good training for me to become a business owner. Money actually when you said, the money, can I make rent? can I pay my staff you know because we would sometimes have days where we had sales of $0.00 that’s hard, it’s hard when you string those together and have two in a row so yeah that was it, and the bank never wanted to know me, no experience Japanese knives that’s a terrible idea, Inglewood that’s a terrible place, so yeah there was no funding to be had, so that was probably our number 1. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Are you happy you didn’t have to get funding? I imagine in the long run it’s way better. 

Kevin Kent: Oh I’m really proud of it now, I still own 100% of the company. and we don’t have any accounts receivable either so we don’t have any debt so we’re in good shape. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: That’s great, did you ever consider quitting? 

Kevin Kent: No, I don’t want to be a cook anymore. My biggest fear is that it all comes crashing down tomorrow and I have to get a job as a chef again. I don’t think I can, it’s hard work. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: What did work-life balance look like to you when you were first starting out? 

Kevin Kent: Work-life balance, I worked a lot but I liked what I was doing so that made it helpful. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So you didn’t do much outside work and knife-related things then? 

Kevin Kent: Luckily I like my job so work and life bled pretty seamlessly at times. Sometimes per example I’m working, but I might be in Mexico. I find that acceptable, I wake up in Mexico,I have 2 hours of emails or telephone calls but then I’m in Mexico and I have the rest of my day to have a holiday. So sometimes work-life balance looks like that, one of the rules we have at our shop actually and in our company is now that if you’re on holiday, you cannot answer emails, it’s forbidden and we set our autoresponder and it says that. I’m on holiday and as Knifewear law is I can’t answer emails and ill go in and change mine, especially my managers, I’ll go in and change their emails because they try to cheat and holidays are for that you need to recharge your batteries,get new ideas and be relaxed and have fun. And not thing about your emails. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Yeah I don’t know how to do that. 

Kevin Kent: Yeah so I’m really good at preaching work-life balance for my staff and I’m getting better at it.I’m 11 years in and I’m getting better at it. Doing the book was really helpful because it was a huge undertaking and I had to settle down and write a book and so I just told everybody I couldn’t do any work. I put my autoresponder on for 3 months and said I was away and can’t respond or I will when I can. And I think that was really helpful to remind me that I’ve got a really excellent team that doesn’t need me to coddle them. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So what advice do you have for entrepreneurs who are at that stage where they want to step out of their business, stop being the bottleneck and delegate? 

Kevin Kent: Open lots of stores or expand to the point where you can’t do everything because that is the best part. I just kind of force myself into it, I have to be honest when I”m in the shops now, I feel like that weird uncle that just gets in the way, he’s well-meaning but he does everything wrong. We’ve got a new computer system that I haven’t worked with, so even just ringing through a customer now is difficult for me because I have to go and learn right from the beginning. How does this work? So yeah if you want work-life balance and you want to delegate, expand to the point that you can’t do everything. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Do you have things to consider before they launch a business? 

Kevin Kent: Make sure you get enough of whatever you want to sell, and make sure you really really like it. Because you’re going to be doing it a lot and if you don’t love what you’re trying to sell, you’ll get bored of it and it’ll be hard to inspire yourself. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: What do you have for goals for the book in the future? What do you want to do with that? 

Kevin Kent: What do I want to do with the book? I want to be on the bestseller list, it’s not going to happen, unfortunately, the bestseller list work really interesting, I won’t get on it because it counts sales through bookstores only. So, for example, we sell a lot of books at my knife stores and we sell a lot of my book but those don’t count. So anyway what I’d like with the book, I’d like a lot of people to read the book and pat me on the back and say well done. Because that’s quite fun. It’s interesting getting into things like a book because this is intellectual property and then this book is going to be next year will be in stores and it’ll still be the book we want it to be and I don’t have to write it again next year and that’s exciting.That’s really exciting.I’m already planning two more books now, I quite liked it actually. So hey, more books. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: That’s exciting. So now that you have 6 KnifeWear stores and 5 Kent of Inglewood, so 11 stores, what kind of challenges are you facing now that you’re at this point in your growth? 

Kevin Kent: Our biggest challenge right now is staffing at the store level and then getting people in the management pipeline. So we’re looking into the future all the time now, honestly, we could have stopped at 6 stores and I’d really have a nice little life. But then all of my senior managers, would eventually just leave because they’d get bored because there’s nowhere for them to grow, so we just keep expanding in ways that keep our staff motivated and make sure that there’s space for people to move up into and make sure we have enough people in the pipeline from the entry-level that we can keep funneling them into management. So that’s probably our biggest challenge these days. Challenges can sound like a bad word, I just see it as a fun game. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Is there anything you struggle with more, that’s maybe less so a challenge and more so a problem that you’re trying to overcome? 

Kevin Kent: Our biggest problem that we have is inventory. We don’t buy a lot of mass-produced items so for example, if you were a blacksmith that produces knives lets say, I want to buy 100, and you say that’s an excellent idea, Kevin, I’m going to go buy some steel now and make those for you and if I start ordering more than you can produce, I’m just not going to get them because we’ve outstripped your production. So that’s one of our things, we would have a Toronto store already if we could have nailed down enough inventory in different ways but I think we have this under control now too because now we have monthly standing orders, we got a lot of systems in place to make sure we don’t run out of knives because I hate having hungry stores and no knives to feed them. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Have you had to look for more blacksmiths? 

Kevin Kent: Yeah look for more blacksmiths and kind of forge better relationships sometimes and also we’ve been buying more factory-produced knives just to kind of supplement things just because they are not made by a man with a hammer in hand, doesn’t mean they’re bad knives they’re just not the kind of as romantic. But I think we’ve cracked it now. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Can you get factory produced knives that are comparable? 

Kevin Kent: Oh yeah we only buy stuff that’s awesome, but again it’s all from Japan, all of our knives are from Japan, so yeah our biggest problem right now is just making sure we have enough inventory. But I think we’re there now so Toronto watch out. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: How did you overcome that problem,? 

Kevin Kent: Good relations, expanding to more producers, investing in the producers, we’ve been helping them recruit. When I go to Japan, the last time I was there I spoke at 2 different high schools, about how great the quality products that are created in their neighborhood or in their city so I go there and basically try to help them recruit because the blacksmiths though with the book and with our customers are quite famous amongst our stores but in Japan they’re just kind of seen as welders right so nobody really knows whats going on and most of the places we buy our knives from these towns that produce all these knives they don’t have recognition like people don’t even know that these knives are built there, right there so my job sometimes is to go to highschools and give them a talk about international trade, and how the product made in their backyard are really popular outside of Japan and that this is an exciting industry to be apart of. So I have to recruit now too, all kinds of stuff 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Very cool, 

Kevin Kent: Yeah it’s super fun. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: That’s fascinating, there’s a lot of facets to the work you’re doing 

Kevin Kent: There’s a lot of moving parts, but that’s handy because I like being busy. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: That’s good, that’s really good. So out of the last 11 years now, what do you think you’ve learned that’s really essential for entrepreneurs like this series is really about bringing value and education to up and coming business owner, what do you think really stands out that you should share with other entrepreneurs? 

Kevin Kent: Things that I wish I knew were you don’t need a business plan, although you need a business plan if you want to secure funding from the bank. But everybody I know who had a business plan and tried to stick to it, they couldn’t because business up and flows, things change all the time so be prepared to duck and dive and be prepared to do things that wasn’t in your business plan but are a good idea, be flexible and take care of your staff they’re the ones that build my business right, so typically in retail, you pay minimum wage and don’t do anything nice for them, we’ve always paid a living wage to start which is enough for a family of 4 to live off of, we’ve always paid a living wage, we do profit sharing we have above and beyond bonuses, we have a house spending account, we do champagne Saturdays, we do really great Christmas parties, if you’ve been with us for 10 years, you get a 3 month paid holiday. Come on, that’s cool, right? 

Jonathan Hafichuk: That’s great. 

Kevin Kent: And [Inaudible] is coming up in 2020, we got 2 people the year after that and 3 people the year after that, and they’re already making their plan outs this is retail people don’t stick around in retail generally and they tend to turn through their staff and these are the people that are building my brand and these are the people that are front face, these are the people who talk to customers every day, why don’t I want people that are super experienced, great at their job and like it so take care of your staff, super important. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Very cool, that makes sense. 

Kevin Kent: It does make sense! I have to be emphatic about that. Take care of your staff, they’re the ones that take care of your customers, Having a retail store, selling what we sell, customers want to see the same people all the time they build a relationship with them, why would I want them to go away? I don’t. So I want to keep them, let’s make retail a really great career for them. And then keep expanding so they have the opportunity to move up. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: So what’s your goal for Knifewear and Kent Of Inglewood, let’s say 10 years from now? 

Kevin Kent: Well immediate plans with what’s going on we’ve got Knifewears in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa and Vancouver, Toronto is clearly on the plan and so is Kyoto, Japan. And then all of those stores we want Kent Of Inglewood I see in the future, probably 2 Vancouver stores if were looking 10 years down the line, say we’ll probably have 2 Vancouver stores for Knifewear maybe 2 for Kent certainly in Toronto 2 or 3 stores, Kyoto, Japan with both brands, I want to start investing in a factory in Japan, like I want to harness some of our own production there, so I want to make kind of a, I need some Japanese partners first but I want to make a blacksmithing school partnered with a blacksmith production factory as well. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Wow. That’s exciting 

Kevin Kent: Let’s make it cool, let’s recruit some people and let’s give them an exciting life they can throw themselves into and an exciting career and give them a place to learn and give them a place to practice. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Cool, can I come shoot a video of your factory once it opens? 

Kevin Kent: Ya man, 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Sweet. Great well I think that’s all I have for questions that was really fascinating I’m really excited to see what you do with the stores and the production and I might have to come get one of your knives. 

Kevin Kent: Might? 

Jonathan Hafichuk: They’re amazing, After trying one at the market I was like wow this is really something else, 

Kevin Kent: It’s a totally different thing right? 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Yeah it’s on another level. 

Kevin Kent: You cut and you’re like this is not what ie done before. It makes it really easy for us to sell our product that way too because it’s undeniably better and then were just nice to our customers, we’ve written on the back of all the stores “ Everyone must leave happier than when they arrived,” which is good, I mean staff, I mean customers, I mean the delivery driver, let’s just make everybody’s day so if we can make people’s day, let them find a product that’s undeniably better, educate them and entertain them, in the end they’ll buy some knives or our product, I think it’s that simple, we apply hospitality. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: It’s great, where can people go to find out more about you and what you’re doing? 

Kevin Kent: Well, Knifewear.com, Kentofinglewood.com, and longlettermedia.com, its the book and films and some other stuff, we’re working on a TV show as well. 

Jonathan Hafichuk: Cool, that’s really exciting, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it 

Kevin Kent: Cheers buddy.

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