These are our thoughts and beliefs about what makes a knife worth making. If you’d prefer a practical guide to why our knives perform as they do, [Why Savernake?] has the technical detail.
Very complex – as it turns out – but also not in the least.
The complication really lies in understanding what’s actually important, and which bits are just noise. There is an enormous amount of noise in the knife world; breathless and often baseless marketing, mysterious steel codes in capital letters, men gently shaving their forearms on YouTube. There are many confident claims about next-generation metallurgy and, not infrequently, outright lying dressed up as specification. (A knife going for under £20 is going to be dreadful, whatever the website says – a “thousand years of samurai tradition” my arse. This is not a controversial position.)
Here is the thing that cuts through all of it: there are roughly half a dozen objective criteria by which you can say, without sentiment or salesmanship, whether one knife is better than another. Hardness, thinness behind the edge, geometry, balance, sharpness, edge retention, corrosion resistance and so on. These are not matters of opinion – you can measure them, test them, and compare them directly.
Every significant knife maker in the world compromises on at least one of them. Sometimes for reasons of heritage – the great German houses have been using the same steels for so long that changing would be an existential crisis. Sometimes for reasons of tradition – hand-forgers are limited to non-stainless materials their methods can handle. Sometimes for reasons of cost, or manufacturing convenience, or simple laziness, covered over afterwards with enough marketing to make the limitation sound like a virtue.
The Japanese make their blades extremely hard, which allows a ferocious initial edge but makes them brittle, fussy to maintain, a complete swine to sharpen and quick to chip the moment they meet anything demanding. The Germans make theirs softer, which is tougher but blunts faster. Each school – and their followers – has spent a lot of time and money explaining, with great conviction, why their particular compromise is actually a sound philosophy.
We started with no such baggage. No inherited process, no founding mythology, no machinery already paid for that dictates what’s possible. So we asked a simpler question: what would a knife look like if you tried your best not to compromise on any of those criteria?
The answer, it turned out, required us to invent something.
A sharp but thick blade doesn’t slice, it splits. Achieving genuine thinness while maintaining strength across the whole blade is hard work, because the geometry required is genuinely difficult to produce consistently. We spent three years working out how to do it properly, and the result is our concave blade profile – slightly hollow-ground along the flat of the blade, almost certainly unique in kitchen knife-making, and the reason our blades sit at 0.3mm thickness at 1mm from the cutting edge.
That is, more or less, how we think about everything – identify the objective standard and go for it. If getting there requires building a new approach from scratch, then it’s time to get our thinking caps on.
We are not romantics about process. We don’t forge because forging is noble, we don’t use Damascus because it looks dramatic, we don’t make heavy knives because weight feels like quality (it doesn’t, it feels like tired hands). We use the methods and materials that produce the best outcome, full stop. How many hand-forged Damascus components are currently in a Formula 1 engine? Or the International Space Station? None. Not because engineers don’t appreciate poetry, but because performance wins.
A knife only comes alive when someone picks it up and uses it, and everything we do is in recognition of that fact. We want a knife that does exactly what you intend, without effort, without correction and without drawing undue attention to itself. A knife you forget about when it’s in your hand, because there’s nothing to fault.
