A conversation with Jansen Sharpening’s Demetrius Amrein

Demetrius Amrein did not go out looking to get into the knife business, but when it found him, he found his calling. Now, a little less than a year into his job as proprietor of Tower Grove Farmers’ Market mainstay Jansen Sharpening, Amrein is excited to see where the season takes him and how he can grow the business.

You say that you didn’t set out to take over a knife sharpening business, but here you are as owner of Jansen Sharpening. How did that happen? Last year, I was working for my now-fiance’s father around his farm, and he told me that he had some friends who were looking for a young entrepreneur to take over their business. They were trying to get out of it and thought they could kill the business organically, but they failed to do so because the customer base was so strong. I am a very numbers-oriented person and have always been fascinated with sharp objects—I had pocket knives and machetes as a young boy that some people might consider dangerous, but I greatly enjoyed them. When I had the opportunity to learn about them professionally, I was like, ‘Wow, cool,’ but I also realized this business has a ton of potential. In May of last year, I started coming to market every week and going through the gauntlet of learning to sharpen the right way so the business could be passed on to me successfully. I finally purchased it last July and am excited to be doing it with a little more ambition.

It doesn’t sound that different from how the company’s founders, Maria and Seth Jansen, began the company. They started the company in 2014, after they went on vacation to Chicago and happened upon somebody sharpening knives at the farmers’ market there. They thought it was a really cool idea and talked to the guy doing it. He trained them and taught them his method of doing things, and when they got back [to St. Louis], they decided they wanted to try it out. They did their first market in 2014; Tower Grove was the first one they did, and from there, they started branching out to other farmers’ markets and ended up throwing around ideas of mobile or mail in sharpening. 

What was the learning curve like for you? It was way easier than I thought it would be. It definitely takes practice, but there are a few basic principles that will allow it to be perfect every single time. A lot of companies use a fixed jig to hold the perfect edge, but we sharpen free-hand. It’s not a fixed angle, but we can keep an extremely consistent angle, and what is unique is that we can sharpen quickly and don’t have to adjust our equipment every time. We can put the exact same edge back on a knife that it had on Day 1.

What makes your method special? A lot of companies use a dry sharpening method, but we use a wet method that turns at a low RPM. Because it’s water-cooled, it keeps the knife cool to prevent damage to the steel. This extends the life of the knife, because we are only taking off a very small amount of material. The dry method gets hotter and melts the metal right off the knife. The way that we do it,  interestingly enough, is more of a traditional method. If you look back in history, you have these huge grinding stones to sharpen axes and swords and stuff. After the electric motor came along, people thought that method must be outdated, and they came up with contraptions to sharpen knives quickly and efficiently but ended up missing a huge part of how it works. Now, we can scientifically prove that water-cooled sharpening is absolutely the best, without a doubt.

What would you say to someone who thinks their knife is too far gone to benefit from sharpening? We get people coming in with knives you wouldn’t even believe how they did it. We get some that have big chips or where people have broken off the tip. We can fix those. I recently had a guy that had a pocket knife for who knows how long; the tip broke off, and there were big chips out of it. He asked if we could do it and if so, when he could schedule a time to come and pick it up. I told him he didn’t need to schedule something; I’d have it done in five minutes. When he got it back, it looked better than it had looked in 20 years. I’ve seen a lot of stuff, and we can fix a lot more than people think. Sometimes it’s a little bit too far gone, but that’s very rare. Our goal as a business is to keep people from throwing their knives away. We live in a throwaway society, and I have seen people throw away a really good knife and buy a new one just because it was dull. We can do a lot of good.

This is your first year as owner of Jansen. Do you have plans for the business outside of the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market? One of things we are trying to get figured out this year—hopefully within the next month or two—is mobile knife sharpening for restaurants and beauty salons for beauty shears. It’s just a matter of putting our equipment in a vehicle and showing up. We want to get recurring customers at a very minimal cost to them; we just show up whenever they need their materials sharpened, whether that’s every month or every couple of weeks, and put them on a schedule so they don’t have to think about it. Another thing we are thinking about is mail-in knife sharpening. There are quite a few companies that do it, but not many are reputable. When you’re sending away your $500 chef knife in the mail, it’s not necessarily a comforting thought, so I’ve been trying to figure out ways that might be able to fix that for people to give them more comfort in knowing that they are in good hands.