neither of them are in major knife making regions effected by this change... you will see this change in places with blacksmith and sharpener associations like sakai, seki, sanjo, and echizen. As i mentioned before, material costs are not really the big factor... wages for the craftsmen are. The direct to consumer places have control over what they get paid, and are marking up their knives as they would if they were a wholesaler too. Craftsmen in places like sakai do not have the same level of control over pricing. As the craftsmen raise prices, that gets passed along to the wholesalers (for those who use them... and somtimes multiple wholesalers in some cases), and then on to the consumer.
In essence, your comparison is like saying you bought a table from a guy who makes tables for such and such a price, and his price hasnt changed as much as buying from crate and barrell, which is effected by changes in minimim wages, livabale wages required, tax changes, rent changes, supplier price increases, etc., much more than that woodworker you bought from. In this example (when compared to the knife world), the supplier was selling at roughly the same price to crate and barrell for many years, but crate and barrell continued to raise priced. Now the supplier is raising prices again, in a much more significant way (imagine guys making $8 per hour now making $15-16 per hour for their work making the items), and that cost is getting passed along to the consumer at the end of the day. Does that make more sense of it?