A direct-to-consumer knife brand built around two ideas: customers should feel like they’re building their own knife, and the brand should give back to the community it sells to.
Founder-led. Two people on the client side, one on mine.
This is an ongoing collaboration to keep growing the brand and site without losing simplicity or what makes it feel local.
001 CONDITIONS
Conditions.
// Build and launch
- CUSTOM SITE BUILD
- CUSTOM CONFIGURATOR
- CUSTOM CONTEST PLUGIN
- BRAND APPLICATION
// Maintain and expand
- ONGOING CONFIGURATOR EXPANSION
- NEW PRODUCT LAUNCHES
- MONTHLY CONTEST CYCLES
- PRODUCT AND LIFESTYLE PHOTOGRAPHY
- FUTURE FEATURES AND GROWTH
// Collaborate
- FOUNDERS
002 PRINCIPAL
One decision at a time.
003 APPLIED TO THE CUSTOMER
The knife builder.
// The knife builder
HAViK wanted to give customers a real range of choices and have them feel like they were building something of their own. The standard e-commerce tools could technically do it, but the options got buried in a wall of dropdowns and variant pickers that turned a knife you’d want to design into a form you’d want to leave. The configurator was the answer. The customer makes one decision at a time and ends with a knife that feels like theirs. It runs on the existing shopping cart, builds the right product details behind the scenes, and tracks inventory intelligently so customers don’t pick options that aren’t available.
The configurator was also built to grow. New blade and handle options can be added without rebuilding anything, the wizard absorbs them.
HAViK knife builder configurator
004 APPLIED TO THE COMMUNITY
The voting contest.
// The voting contest
HAViK wanted a way to honor first responders, nominated and voted on by the public, without spending every month managing the contest by hand. The custom contest plugin runs the monthly cycle automatically: it knows when nominations are open, when voting is open, and when to announce a winner, and it shows the right thing on the site at each phase. There’s a manual override for the cases when a phase needs to start early, end late, or skip a month. The point is that the contest runs itself, and stays out of the way when HAViK needs to step in.
005 APPLIED TO THE SITE
Photography.
// Photography
HAViK wanted photography that matched the brand: dark, gritty, outdoors, real. Not clean studio shots that strip out personality, not posed scenes that read as catalog. The work is product imagery that shows the detail the knives earn, and outdoor imagery that’s actually outdoors.
006 THE LONG VIEW
The long view.
// Keep growing
The site is built to grow. New product options drop into the configurator without code changes. The contest runs on its own month after month. And the foundation under both was scoped with what’s coming next in mind, including a subscription offering and other directions HAViK is planning. Launch was the beginning of the engagement, not the end of it.
Lea took our ideas and turned them into something better than we imagined, especially the custom product flow that turned a cluttered page into an interactive experience our customers actually enjoy using.
HAViK knife builder configurator