"Everything is sharpened in this little back room. We kind of have a station for every task."
Tyler Ek is standing in an entryway between a retail space and a workspace on College Avenue in Fayetteville. He sharpens knives for a living — well, knives and scissors and grooming tools and other used-to-be-sharp objects. He's our next spotlight in our series Brick, Mortar and Beyond.
His business, Honed In, began in a kiosk at 8th Street Market in Bentonville in 2018. He wasn't the owner, but he was the first and only employee. He had been working in hazardous waste and hated it. He didn't already sharpen knives when he went to his job interview, but he was ready. He put his pocket knife out on the table and started talking about edge geometry and the chemical changes happening on the surface of the blade.
"I think I was a shoe-in at that point. All right, you're in, come on."
What Tyler didn't know is that the business owner would want to sell. About nine months later, he had the opportunity to become the owner — and he did, moving the fledgling business to a flea market in Prairie Grove.
"We ended up moving from the back of the flea market, like a dungeon closet kind of thing, into the front of the flea market where we had our own big, like, 6-foot logo on the picture window and our own front door. And that was great."
Going great — and then the pandemic and the evaporation of walk-in traffic. Tyler pivoted. Instead of people bringing their dull knives to him, he'd take his sharpening tools to the people, starting a regular farmers market gig on Saturday mornings in Fayetteville.
"I actually had the trailer purchased for going mobile before the pandemic happened. But whenever everything shut down and overhead got scary, we decided to pack everything in the trailer and went mobile."
That shift not only kept the business afloat but strengthened ties between Tyler and his clients. He says the dramatic repositioning of the pandemic meant some clients needed more things sharpened more often.
"Dog groomers and veterinarians — people were staying home with their dogs or going on hikes. And so they realized how dirty these dogs are, how injured they were getting. And so the veterinarians I found and the dog groomers never really stopped during the pandemic."
He also started a drop-off locker service to emphasize contact-free interactions. Both the mobile service and drop-off lockers continue alongside a new brick-and-mortar presence on College Avenue, inside the former Knight Times Tattoo — that's K-N-I-G-H-T, Knight Times — in a building that looks like a castle.
But why bring rent back into the picture when the mobile service and lockers were working well? Tyler says it came down to capacity.
"I kept on hearing from people that would go on my booking app and say, I want your services, but you're booked up, or I can't find a time that works for me, or I'm never in Fayetteville on a Saturday. And so I wanted to widen my funnel to accept these people that wanted my services. And in my opinion, a brick-and-mortar was the best way to go about it."
The new space provides room for retail but also for the tools the work requires. If your clientele includes grooming tools, fabric scissors and trusted chef's knives, you need some pretty big machinery and some pretty intricate accessories.
"The first thing I reach for every time I sharpen a knife is my mask, and that's a powered air respirator. It's quite the contraption if you ever see it on me. It's a belt motor that has a hose going up to a helmet and it just constantly pushes fresh air around my face. And so the dust can kind of be in the environment, but it never really contacts my sensitive organs."
Along with the fancy mask, there's a three-belt progression sharpener and the industrial-strength MK-75 belt sander. There are also handheld tools — whetstones, handle benders, things that add set to scissors. Sharpening, after all, is a skill that goes back millennia.
When he took the leap into sharpening beauty tools, it was an education — texturizers, straight-cutting shears, blenders, thinners.
"Whenever I took the leap into sharpening beauty tools, it was an education. It just really relit my fire. There's a whole new chapter of things to learn and to master and to care about. I love learning and I love expanding my skills. And so that's maybe why we sharpen so many different things."
The new space also lets Tyler do something he likes to do: talk to people. He likes to tell the story of cutlery whenever he sells a knife — how restaurants cropped up in French society and created the need for a chef's knife, how it moved to Germany, then to Japan, each culture putting its own mark on the design.
"I can't imagine what a chef's knife will look like in 100 years, or if it'll even change. It's a fun concept to think about."
And when it comes to the sharpening itself, there is time to converse and time to just pay attention to the work.
"Things are spinning really fast and sometimes they're spinning fast by your head. It keeps you on your toes. It's pretty dangerous. You don't want to sharpen while you're tired. You don't want to sharpen while you have your mind on something else."
We spent time with Tyler Ek at Honed In's brick-and-mortar space in Fayetteville earlier this spring as part of our series Brick, Mortar and Beyond. This is Ozarks at Large.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
