I started Iron Grove in 2016 with little more than some encouragement from my lovely wife Lynne and a hard-set belief that with enough hard work and dedication, we could still carve out a living in the modern world doing something that we love.
One-man-band
The first couple years were a little rough, but I remember them fondly: forging by myself in an old barn on our family homestead as we poured everything I made back into gathering equipment, improving the shop space and processes, and learning as much as I could about the craft and business I've immersed our family in. I enjoy photography, it allows me to show people what I see, and eventually my photos on social media allowed our small one-man company to reach chefs, hunters and cooking enthusiast around the world, selling out our tools in minutes of their release and shipping anywhere the local customs allow for knife imports. In 2019 I began work with Mill Scale Metalworks, collaborating with their team to conceptualize, design and create a line of Fire Tools that became amongst their top-selling products. Within the year following that successful endeavor, I was offered more bulk production work from Filson, 44 Farms, Huckberry, Kimono Joe and other name brand retailers that made it clear that if I wanted Iron Grove to grow with these opportunities, I could no longer do this on my own.
I reached out to a couple local craftsmen I had become friends with, offered them jobs in our Dripping Springs shop, and we went to work bulk forging Fire Tools, grilling sets, skillets, bottle openers, and shovels, sometimes hundreds at a time, but the knives were still all mine.
Sold Out
If you've followed us for some time, you may recall a time that our website was often empty. It's the most consistent feedback I've ever received in this work: the frustration over a constantly sold-out site. Although it's not the worst problem a small business can have, as a customer it's a nightmare, so with the addition of Mark "Red" McCombs of Red Monkey Customs and Caleb Cleaver of Caleb Cleavers Smithy, two incredibly talented knifemakers I can trust to help create knives to my artistic standard, we set the goal of producing enough blades to keep our website stocked at all times. This sort of batch-work became our norm. We took classic models I had forged myself 100 times, turned them into repeatable templates and hammered them out in bigger numbers in hopes to compete with the higher quality commercial makers. But over time I felt limited in creativity, it's hard to try something totally new with a larger batch, especially if I'm not sure it's going to work. The tools we make here have never quite felt like "work" to me, I enjoy making them and wanted to keep following that joy wherever it leads. But exploring new materials and techniques is also more costly and could move our tools out of being accessible for working cooks, something I was always against until it dawned on me.
We can do both.
A Heartfelt Collection
The Signature Collection is my effort to stay connected with what drove me to swing a hammer all day in the first place: a pure artistic exploration with no limits, no wrong answer and no idea what's coming around the next bend until I get there. I work mostly in a flow state, following the materials that pique my interest with only loose concepts of what I might be making that allow the art of this craft to convey as much onto me as I do onto them. I don't like to plan them out, I don't want to. I want to turn my brain off and just make something beautiful that challenges me and pulls a satisfaction out of my day that only obstacle and struggle can. I want to fail, I do often, and I learn, and I try again until the tools before me reflect the pure joy I get from making them. A joy I hope you can see in their artistry, my personal exploration of greatness in the craft.
A joy that brings meaning and beauty to the table, yours and mine.
-Daniel
See the latest Signature Collection here.
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