A Chat with April’s Profile, A.G. Russell and Goldie Russell, president and CEO, A.G. Russell Knives

CS: What’s your annual circ?
Goldie: About 5 million.

CS: And the number of SKUs?
Goldie: Actually in inventory, it’s about 3,000. Any given catalog carries about 300. But the Web site is much deeper.

CS: What are your primary customer demographics?
Goldie: Definitely male. Age 45 to 65. Strongly oriented towards hunting and shooting. What I like to call the rugged outdoors type. A.G. doesn’t like the word rugged. It’s that shooting, hunting traditional.

CS: What are your sales channels?
A.G.: About 30 percent on the Web. We do 11 knife catalogs per year. 5 to 6 Russell’s for Men catalogs. About 20 brochures per year. And 50 e-mail specials to 60,000 subscribers, so about once a week. That’s what we do during the year.

Goldie: We basically have three channels. We have the catalog sales, either phone or mail. And that was 63 percent last year. The Internet is about 30 percent, with the retail store onsite at about 7 percent.

CS: How many employees?
Goldie: About 45.

CS: How did the company get started?
A.G.: I returned to Arkansas from California. The movers somehow lost my Arkansas stone. The Arkansas stone is a mineral called novaculite and it’s found only in central Arkansas over into eastern Oklahoma. It’s on the surface, with very little soil on top, easy to access. This is a sharpening stone. From the early 1800s, Europeans first found this stone in 1820. The Native Americans were using it to make tools. It’s similar to flint, just in a much purer, easier to work form. The Europeans found that it would sharpen steel in a superior fashion. It was the premium sharpening stone until ceramics came along. Long story short, the movers lost it, and I had a hard time finding a replacement. Eventually it became so difficult to find, I went to the world’s source, in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and bought enough to put myself into the mail order business peddling whetstones. In addition to putting ads in the American Rifleman and other magazines, I went to local hardware stores, which had earlier refused to order three of them so I could buy one, and I sold them smaller stones to sell to their customers. One of these hardware stores told me about an importer who had been importing Swedish kitchen knives and German pocket knives who had died. I got in touch with his widow and bought their stock, so all of a sudden I was in the knife business as well as the whetstone business.