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
- PRODUCT AND LIFESTYLE PHOTOGRAPHY
- FUTURE FEATURES AND GROWTH
// Collaborate
- FOUNDERS
002 PRINCIPLE
One decision at a time.
003 APPLIED TO THE BRAND
Built to get dirty.
Jake’s starting reference wasn’t another knife brand. It was Ken Block: rally cars sliding through dirt, loud graphics, and zero interest in looking polished. HAViK needed that same energy, pointed at the outdoors.
That became the rule Jake and I built everything around: the photography, the graphic elements, the copy. Nothing gets in because it’s pretty. It gets in because it fits.
The site, the photos, and every product launch since have passed the same test, whoever is making the call.
SCROLL TO EXPLORE
HOMEPAGE - Brand direction, set at the front door
004 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.
New blade and handle options drop in without a rebuild. A page that used to be a wall of dropdowns is now the part of the site customers actually enjoy using.
HAViK knife builder configurator
005 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 ran the monthly cycle automatically: it knew when nominations were open, when voting was open, and when to announce a winner, and it showed the right thing on the site at each phase. A manual override covered the cases when a phase needed to start early, end late, or skip a month. For as long as HAViK ran the contest, it ran itself.
006 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. The photos carry the brand’s attitude, so the copy doesn’t have to.
007 THE LONG VIEW
The long view.
// Keep growing
Launch was the start, not the finish. Since then, a new knife has gone into the configurator and the H1 and H2 have new handle options, all without a rebuild. The foundation was scoped with HAViK’s next plans in mind, so whatever comes next has room to land.
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.