325. The Knife Company That Waited 5.5 Years to Launch Its Best-Selling Product - Brandon Horoho, Montana Knife Company

325. The Knife Company That Waited 5.5 Years to Launch Its Best-Selling Product - Brandon Horoho, Montana Knife Company

Montana Knife Company's number one search term has been pocket knives for years. The brand didn't sell a single one until this year. Brandon Horoho, the company's co-founder, vice president and CMO, explains why on this episode of Customers Who Click, and what it took to finally launch a product category the company had been quietly building demand for since the start.

Horoho returns to the podcast a year after his first appearance, and the scale of change at MKC in that time is hard to overstate. The company has moved into a new 51,000 square foot manufacturing facility, thrown a grand opening that drew over 8,000 people, hired 5 new marketing staff after going an entire year without adding to the team, and launched its first ever pocket knife after holding off for 5.5 years.

Why MKC Waited 5.5 Years to Launch Its Biggest Product

Horoho compares the decision to Apple not having the iPhone. In the wider knife market, most brands sell 8 folding pocket knives for every 1 fixed blade hunting knife. MKC built its name doing the opposite, on fixed blades, widely considered the hardest knife category to sell. Launching a pocket knife wasn't a new product decision. It was a new business decision, and the company treated it that way internally.

The delay came down to manufacturing, not marketing. MKC could have white labelled a pocket knife from one of a handful of American manufacturers that already supply most of the industry, put its own logo on it, and shipped it years ago. Instead, every component on the new knife, called the Montanan, including the screws, the blade, the pivots and the ball bearings, had to be made in-house first. Horoho wanted nothing on the shelf that any competitor could also buy.

Marketing a Product That Keeps Getting Banned

Hunting knife ads get pulled from Meta and Google on a regular basis, which has forced MKC to build a marketing approach that doesn't lean on direct response. The brand spends on broad awareness instead, including TV through Tatari, sending traffic to branded landing pages that show no products at all. From there, customers either click through or hand over an email address, and MKC retargets through email and SMS rather than ads.

It's not a clean, attributable funnel. Horoho describes it as a Plinko chip dropping through pegs before it lands somewhere near a purchase. Increased spend has recently earned MKC dedicated reps at both Meta and Google, which has eased some of the friction, but the brand still treats every new ad as its own puzzle to solve.

What MKC leans on instead is organic content, a lot of it. Horoho tells his in-house team their job is to outsell the paid ad agency before a single ad even runs. The company publishes between 50 and 100 pieces of original content most weeks, including a Built in Public series that takes customers through the manufacturing process, from the original two-car garage to the new facility.

Four Black Fridays Instead of One

That same instinct for specificity shaped last year's Black Friday. Rather than one sitewide discount, MKC ran 4 separate sales, one each for its hunting, culinary, tactical and everyday carry product lines. It meant 4 times the planning and 4 times the creative output, but it delivered 4 record sales days back to back.

The approach reflects how MKC thinks about its customer base. The average buyer owns close to 3 knives, at $275 to $350 each, and the brand has over 60,000 five-star reviews. One repeat customer has placed more than 300 orders. Some of that is collecting. A meaningful chunk of it is gifting, with VIP customers buying 6 knives at a time to hand out to staff, hunting guides or clients, supported by a personal concierge inside the company.

Horoho is candid about what scaling further actually requires. MKC sponsors the college football stadium in Missoula, with its logo on the field and visibility through ESPN broadcasts, the kind of spend that would have been unthinkable for the small team that started in a two-car garage. The bets are getting bigger too. Where the company once tested ideas with $20,000 to $50,000 marketing decisions, Horoho now has to get comfortable signing off on half a million dollar and million dollar bets. The goal behind all of it is headcount: MKC wants to grow to 200 to 250 employees, which means the brand has to keep scaling to support it. Horoho says the upside of growing this way is that MKC never has to place a bigger order with an outside factory it doesn't control. It can just hire and promote from within.

MKC passed $50 million in revenue last year and is already planning its release calendar out to the middle of 2027. The full conversation covers more on regulated-category marketing, the gifting economy around knives, and how Horoho is preparing the business for a jump well past where it sits today.