The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone

The meeting, at Amazon’s offices in Seattle, was tense. Kevin Bates was joined by his boss Dan Joy, a director of hard-line categories like kitchen and dining. Bates and Joy seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Wüsthof was walking away and vowed to acquire Wüsthof knives through the gray market. They also threatened the company, as Arnold recalls, saying that every time a customer searched on Amazon for the Wüsthof brand, Amazon would show advertisements for competitors like J. A. Henckels, another knife company based in Solingen, and Victorinox, maker of Swiss army knives. Wüsthof and Arnold were shocked by the fierceness of Amazon’s stance and held firm on their decision to withdraw. “Anyone can sell more Wüsthof at half the price. It’s easy,” Arnold says. “But if you start selling at the lower price, maybe you have a heyday for a few years, but within two or three years you drive a two-hundred-year-old family business into a wall. We had to protect our brand. That was the main decision point. So we pulled out.”