In February of this year, Hugo Worsley, founder of knife brand Allday Goods, conducted an experiment. He had been considering expanding Allday’s product range of high-performing, competitively priced kitchen knives, and had been scouring car boot sales for traditional, Sheffield-style table knives, the bone handles of which he replaced with the colourful marbled-plastic ones for which his company — which has already collaborated with brands including Maldon Sea Salt and Paul Smith — is known. When he had made 200 table knives, he decided to sell them at another car-boot sale in Stoke Newington, north London, in the middle of winter — four for £5, as he informed Allday Goods’ Instagram followers — to see if there might be interest.
“From before 7am there was a queue of people waiting to come in,” says Worsley, 31, “and by 10am when we opened it was probably, like, 500 people.” Worsley and his team — he now has three employees with him at his east London workshop, as well as his dog, Pickle — had hoped to tell people the story of the knives, how the blades were sourced, how the handles were made from recycled plastic waste… but the Veja-wearers of N16 were having none of it. “It was like Black Friday and everyone was just kind of fighting for them. There were secondary markets forming within the queue: people buying them for a fiver and selling them for £20, £30, right in front of our eyes. It was just crazy.”
As proof of concept, though, it was hard to argue with, and in July this year Allday released its first official drop of table knives — the blades this time made from recycled steel by a fourth-generation knife-maker in Sheffield — which sold out in a week; a second, larger drop is planned for September. Alongside the staple offerings of bread knives, petty knives and the larger santoku kitchen knives — the prices for which start at an entirely reasonable £85 — in August Allday is launching an edition of table knives with recycled-oak handles hand-painted by the artist Lucy Mahon. Later in the year, it will be releasing a limited run of felt knife-rolls made using vintage RAF jacket fabric remnants.
They’re fun, environmentally conscientious ideas of the kind Worsley typically cooks up, which is exactly how the business started — in his parents’ shed in Norfolk during Covid — when, discouraged by the plastic waste he had seen while working in hospitality and running three branches of his own since-shuttered restaurant, Canard, he began experimenting with melting plastics in a toastie machine (“health and safety was definitely a concern”). Now he has a blossoming business — in 2022, Allday Goods established its own forge in Somerset — and more products to come. “If the table knives sell well, we might start manufacturing forks and spoons and stuff,” Worsley says. Set the alarm. ○
Alldaygoods.co.uk
