Nantucket Blacksmith Keaton Goddard Teams Up With Celebrity Chef For Upcoming Video

Keaton Goddard was born and raised on Nantucket and has always known he had a knack for being a blacksmith. He has worked with metal for much of his life and for the past 12 years, has specifically honed in on making blades.

His skills have taken him from a young kid disgruntled with his day job out of college to a content creator approaching one million subscribers on YouTube, a businessman capable of selling over 500 knives in less than two months, and an attraction impressive enough to convince a former White House chef turned celebrity chef to hop on a plane and fly to Nantucket to collaborate with him on content.

“I've always been a tinkerer and always been into the shop and that sort of stuff," Goddard said. "But blade-wise, I've been doing it for 12 years, and then four years of that professionally."

Goddard, 29, has turned this hobby into a career, and a good one at that. He is the founder and owner of Faraway Forge, where he sells his handcrafted blades and weaponry.

To Goddard, other islanders' junk is his treasure. He frequently repurposes “junk” donated or left behind by others into his art – which is frequently available down at the Farmer’s Market on weekends.

"Just before I started doing the YouTube I began making knives and selling them at the farmers market and the Christmas market here and those went nuts," Goddard said. "I invested, I don't remember exactly, but like $15,000 into my first batch of knives and I was freaking out because I was spending all this money. I didn't know if I was going to sell them, and then I made 200 knives for Christmas and I sold 100 of them in three weeks. I was like ‘Holy s**t... this is nuts.”

The knives range in price from $185 to $375, yet Goddard generally sells them faster than he can produce them. But Goddard has also utilized this skill to become a content creator and another stream of income on YouTube, where he has over 900,000 subscribers.

“Quick version of the whole story is I went to college and got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering before getting a real job, which I hated, and then I got accepted to be on Forged in Fire (where he eventually won first place after building a Japanese Ono Sword) and when I was like ‘Alright, I am going to quit my job. This is my sign,’” Goddard said. “We filmed Forged in Fire in the fall of 2019 or something, and it was about eight or nine months between when we filmed and when we aired. So I made a couple YouTube videos so I would have something online for people to watch once it airs. My third one, I made a katana, a Japanese samurai sword that looked like it came out of Mad Max. It was made out of junk and went completely viral. I posted it with 300 subscribers, and it had one million views in three weeks. It turned into a business overnight and did YouTube full-time for a few years. I had 200,000 subscribers by the time the show aired, and this is the funny part, the show ended up having negligible impact on my subscriber count.”

After breaking his shoulder a couple of years ago, his YouTube channel took a nosedive once he was limited on the amount of content he could create. But Goddard is back and actively seeking how to keep his page relevant.

“I’ve just been trying to find out how to sustain the knife business and the YouTube at the same time so basically all I do is make YouTube videos whenever I can and then I crank out knives the rest of the time,” Goddard said. “Last Christmas I did a Christmas market in Boston and sold 550 knives in seven weeks, so it’s been nuts.”

As he continues to get back to creating more content for his YouTube page with an eye on the one million subscriber mark, Goddard’s latest project will involve Chef Andre Rush, a celebrity chef who formerly served as a White House Chef for four U.S. Presidents (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump). Rush retired from his job at the White House in 2018 and has since taken up content creation, motivational speaking, and life coaching.

"The guys were all super chill and Chef was awesome," Goddard said. "He was working nonstop. If we weren't filming, he was basically on his phone working the whole time. But once we sat down for dinner, my mom cooked dinner (Wednesday night) and we were all just hanging out.”

Goddard and Rush produced a series of videos over a two-day period on Wednesday and Thursday – with each skit having a different storyline while tying into one another at the same time.

One skit involved Rush, who has biceps famously measured to be 24 inches, breaking his knife due to his strength while cooking. In desperate need of a replacement, he calls on Goddard to produce a knife for him.

As Chef arrives at Goddard’s shop, he notices a brand-new knife on his workbench and demands Goddard make one for him in one hour.

The catch: these knives generally take much longer than an hour to create.

“If I did that knife, slow and was making it nice, I would spend probably 10 hours making it," Goddard said.

Another catch is when Rush set the one-hour timer, he set it at 58 minutes, not 60, to make it even more difficult for Goddard to meet his demands without him knowing. Goddard used a car axle from a junked truck to build the knife and was able to complete it in 57 minutes and 36 seconds.

"It was nuts dude. I was running around the shop. It was crazy," Goddard said. ""It's actually a real knife. It was hilarious. I did not think I was going to be able to do it. I legit was like there's no f***ing way it's happening. And it turned out good and it is actually a knife. It wasn't even fake. I literally did it in less than an hour."

The videos are expected to be released in the next couple weeks according to Goddard.

Rush, who has created 336 videos and garnered 4.85 million subscribers on his YouTube page.

The entire collaboration was made possible by Eric Basek and his team at Fanathem, who help YouTube content creators build stable income while increasing their subscribers. They will parse through the video and ultimately publish it.

"I just got a random email from Eric's friend's son who watches my channel and was like 'Hey my dad's friend has this company. Would you like to talk to him?" And I was like yeah sure – you never know. So we hopped on a call, and he told me about his business and then he was like 'Oh man wait. We should do a collab. I'm friends with this chef guy,' and it just it fell into place from there.”

Below are some more photos from the production of the skit. You can follow Goddard’s YouTube page here and the Chef’s page here.