The Traveling Sharpener visits Green Bay, Door County and Fox Valley

If Kelly Lewis of Green Bay could offer a few words of advice to cooks, it would be an encouragement to use sharp knives.

She is the owner of The Traveling Sharpener, a professional knife sharpening service that visits locations around Green Bay, Door County, Appleton and the Fox Valley. And the results? She says there is no comparison between the inexpensive, hand-held units that many people rely on and professional sharpening.

She said, “People need to understand that those store-bought sharpeners, those little tools that people have for sharpening in their home, can do more damage than good. That is one of the most frequent questions I get and one of my greatest frustrations.”

A look at the equipment that fills the trailer of The Traveling Sharpener provides quite the contrast. There is a tower with three motors stacked vertically with a mounted grinder, and belts and wheels. The tower alone, without figuring in the trailer, cost about $13,000.

In addition, learning how to use it required extensive training.

“I trained in California and it was a combination of watching and then hands-on training to learn the skills,” Lewis said. “We had someone watching over our shoulders and correcting us. There is a lot involved — how to angle vertically and horizontally and being in the right spot. There is muscle memory involved to know what the correct process feels like.”

After the initial training, she headed home with a box of cheap knives to practice on. As she became adept at using the equipment, she gained the skills that would later be needed to start a business, something that had never been on her radar.

A native of Milwaukee, Lewis moved to Green Bay to attend college at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay where she majored in business management. At the time, she wasn’t sure what she would do with the major.

She said, “In my mind, I thought that maybe I would get an entry-level job in an office and then work my way up the chain. But after graduation in 2014, I was hired as store manager at Cooks Corner (it was located on Oneida Street) and it was a big challenge in so many ways.”

The biggest challenge came in 2019 when the decision was made to close the store. The owner of Cooks Corner, Pete Burback, reached out before the shop closed and said, “If this doesn’t work out, let’s start brainstorming and get something rolling.”

They reviewed sales figures and thought the most reliable area in the store was the knife department.

“In my four years at Cooks Corner, we routinely had people coming in for knife sharpening. Retail is cyclical so we thought that having that service and products would bridge those gaps,” Lewis said.

With a plan that Burback would be the owner and Lewis the operations manager, they planned to open a small shop in the same center where Cooks Corner had been located. It was named Cutlery Pro Shop.

Lewis explained, “We had a small inventory of some very special knives from Japan and Germany and some utensils and gadgets. My role was marketing, accounting, selling products, and sharpening knives. I got a good education in business, but at the end of the day, we couldn’t make it work.”

When the decision was made to close, that was when The Traveling Sharpener was born. She called the owner of the knife-sharpening machine that had been purchased prior to starting the stand-alone knife shop.

She said, “He was so excited for me. He invited me to come back out to California and spend time planning the business. I went out, and he had a box truck that I liked because everything was set up to get started. I said I’d buy it, and called my dad; he flew out to drive it back. It was all turn-key and worked out well.”

To purchase the truck and equipment, Lewis wrote a business plan to present to lenders. She had written several during college and tried to think of everything that the banks would ask for. Despite that, the process was very slow, and gratefully, her parents stepped in with a loan.

Source: The Traveling Sharpener visits Green Bay, Door County and Fox Valley