Home / Knife Companies / 5 Up And Coming Brands to Watch in 2019

5 Up And Coming Brands to Watch in 2019

October 22, 2018

With the end of the 2018 rapidly approaching, many of us are already looking towards the new year with anticipation. What sort of cutlery releases and innovations will 2019 bring?

Most of that excitement is directed at the brands we know and love. It can be easy to overlook those that are less familiar. But new talent has been surging into the knife industry at a rapid clip, and many up-and-coming makers are already turning heads. Here are five knife companies we think should be on any knife user or collector’s radar in the new year. They’re not all brand new to the game, but each made impressive strides in 2018 they are poised to capitalize on even further in the new year.

V Nives
When an industry veteran like Mike Vellekamp launches a production label, it’s bound to generate excitement. Vellekamp spent 12 years at Spyderco and says that Founder Sal Glesser remains his role model for all things cutlery-related. In the short time that it has been around, V Nives has been steadily building a catalog that manages to hit multiple key price points.

Mikita
Maniago is Italy’s knife making capital, and the Mikita business network, formed in 2018, sees four of the biggest names in Maniago – Fox, Lionsteel, Mercury, and Viper – joining together to create products as one. What’s not to like about that? The first project to see a push from  Mikita was MKM, but the network has promised much more to come in the future.

Three Rivers Manufacturing
TRM is the small batch production label for Halpern Titanium, a company with a sterling reputation as a material supplier and industry OEM. TRM’s Nomad has been well-regarded for years, but recently they’ve put an emphasis on brand new, in-house designs, with the Thunderbird, Kaguya, Neutron, Atom and more. Hopefully the stream of creative releases will continue into 2019 and beyond.

Canal Street Cutlery Co-Op
When Canal Street Cutlery closed its doors in 2015, traditional knife aficionados knew they had lost one of the greats. But nobody expected that the company would come back, with a new, employee-owned co-op business model and a drive to produce small batches of traditional knives using old-fashioned techniques.

Manly Knives
Bulgaria’s Manly Knives has been pushing a unique mix of high performance, high value knives this year. Their Peak and WASP folders gave users the choice of several impressive steels at equally appealing prices. The designs themselves were smart, simple, and clean, and the response has been positive so far. Here’s hoping that 2019 brings another wave of Manly’s unique take on cutlery.

Related Items