Ellenville-based Canal Street Cutlery is carving out a reputation as hand-finishing some of the finest cutlery on the planet.
The five-year-old specialty knife manufacturer is refurbishing a 10,000-square-foot facility where blades have been made since 1848 into a modern factory for producing collector-quality products.
Canal Street Cutlery”™s success was celebrated Dec. 29 and its future buttressed by a $75,000 Upstate Regional Blueprint Grant from Empire State Development Corp. to help expand its product line and invest in new equipment, ultimately leading to the creation of eight jobs. The company has 12 employees.
Canal Street Cutlery was started by Walter Gardiner, a former employee of the now defunct Imperial Schrade Corp. It sells collectors”™ knives to companies such as Cabela”™s and A.G. Russell and has a website and markets at trade shows and word of mouth among cognoscente.
“We”™re a hot little brand that is now known for making the finest folding cutlery and outdoor cutlery in the world,” said Gardiner. “If you could hold one of our knives in your hand and use it, you would feel the difference” between mass-market knives and handcrafted items.
Canal Street Cutlery is not trying to compete with mass-market manufacturing, said Gardiner, who was COO of Imperial Schrade, starting in 1985. Imperial Schrade fought to keep in business its last years, when it was producing some 138 million pieces annually. It invested $14 million in modernizing equipment in the eight years before it closed in 2004, as it neared its 100th anniversary.
“Our equipment and our products were all state-of-the-art, but we couldn”™t match the 17 cents an hour cutlery workers were being paid in China,” said Gardiner, adding the average Schrade worker was paid about $20 an hour and that China does not have OSHA regulations or workers”™ comp expenses.
It wasn”™t long after Schrade closed that Gardiner started Canal Street Cutlery, refurbishing a comparatively tiny factory that had housed cutlery works as early as the 1850s. He started hiring master cutlers to create 100 percent hand-assembled folding blades using the highest quality steel and natural handle products, such as bone, pearl and hardwoods.
“You have got to turn back the clock at Canal Street, to the late 1940s, early ”˜50s, when a cutler would make a knife,” he said. “And if it wasn”™t up to standard, he wasn”™t a cutler very long. We have master cutlers here.”
Gardiner expressed appreciation for the grant, especially to Ulster County Executive Mike Hein who helped facilitate the deal. And he was feted in turn Dec. 29 by officials delighted to have an actual manufacturing facility producing American-made products.
“Empire State Development is pleased to have offered support to Canal Street Cutlery, a business with rich heritage in the mid-Hudson region,” said Empire State Development Mid-Hudson Regional Director Susan Jaffe.
