Montana Knife Company is redefining what American knife making looks like. Founded by master bladesmith Josh Smith, MKC pairs generational craftsmanship with a state-of-the-art, vertically integrated manufacturing plant in Montana. The result is some of the most innovative work in the category, and a product that sells out in minutes with every drop. Josh Smith’s expertise is imbued in every blade, but this isn’t a nostalgia brand. It’s a modern American manufacturer moving faster than anyone else in the space.
Affiliate
MKC doesn’t skip a beat, and they’re highly revered throughout the broader hunting and outdoor categories. Their work ethic is unmatched, and we’ve never seen anything like the magic of their culture until we toured their manufacturing plant in Montana. All that to say, the real challenge was creating meaningful, demonstrable, and most importantly, incremental revenue above and beyond their own ability to drum it up.
There was a second wrinkle, and it’s a good problem to have: as most know, MKC’s knife drops sell out in minutes or less. From an affiliate perspective, inventory constraints and product availability are challenging to navigate, to say the least. You can’t send a partner’s audience to a sold-out product page and expect the program to convert. It’s a tall order, and one our digital and affiliate team was honored to take on.
First things first. To deliver attribution from partners MKC couldn’t already reach on their own, we built analytics sophisticated enough to capture incremental attribution. Our senior analyst ingested MKC’s GA4, Shopify and AvantLink data and wove it through a DevOps pipeline with Google BigQuery to identify overlap across MKC’s marketing channels.
We also built the program to drive net new business from day one. For MKC, that meant a content-first roster with no coupon, deal or loyalty partners. We kept the program lean and focused on partners who create demand for full-price product.
In standing up Gunpowder’s proprietary Increfi (incrementality) dashboard, we illuminated which affiliate partners were driving value and where in the consumer journey they were driving it. We could quantify which partners drove net new conversions, which reactivated existing customers, and which were simply collecting last-click credit for sales MKC would have closed on their own.
The first thing the dashboard illuminated was a big one. One of MKC’s highest attributed revenue partners scored the lowest possible incrementality grade. This affiliate was scraping MKC’s site and collecting a paycheck for selling knives to the same audience MKC could easily reach themselves. We quickly rectified that issue.
Conversely, we recruited a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) affiliate partner that became the program’s largest genuinely incremental revenue driver, delivering true net new sales: customers MKC wasn’t reaching even with their own marketing.
