This is a hot take on the recent chorus from US makers and brands about not buying knockoffs.

Let me start by stating the obvious—don’t buy knockoffs. If you want to be a smart consumer, support good ideas, designers and companies, buy the original. Vote with your This is the very essence of the idea of voting with your wallet. Buy from a trusted retailer and if something seems too cheap to be real that is because it is not. Buy originals. Duh.

But there is more to this than “Don’t buy knockoffs.” Counterfeit goods have been around for a long time—watches, handbags, and designer clothes have been ripped off for decades. The thing I think makers need to know is that this can’t be a one way street. If they want support for original work, they need to do original work. I don’t want to direct this criticism at any one person, but the trend of making a custom, selling a few, then making a production run with the help of a Chinese OEM is over. If you want loyal customers push the limits of what you can do. Phoning it in with a run with different fat carbon inlays doesn’t count.

This goes back to what I wrote in response to TW Price’s IG post regarding the cooling of the market. Markets are going to go up and down—that’s the nature of capitalism. But when the Chinese knockoffs are as good as the real thing, its kind of hard to remain loyal especially in the face of endless waves of barely different, overseas made stuff.

Oh, this is a DIFFERENT knife, its .25 inches longer.

Yeah I need the same knife again, but this time with a wharncliffe blade.

I guess I’ll take a third version of the same knife with minor tweaks that should have been part of the original design.

An auto version? Sure, I guess, why not…

Over and over again some of the more prolific self-publishers of blades have produced stuff that is, frankly, completely redundant. There is no innovation, no changes, no updates (maybe steel, but usually not) just more of the same. In effect, they are knocking off themselves. They need to push and innovate.

This is difficult, but it is not impossible. There are an abundance of different makers that do this well. Vero Engineering seems to consistently hit with new stuff. The new blades are certainly iterations on the same design language but not every wave of releases is simply a reskin of a previous release. Winter Blade Co. also hits a bunch of different marks, again with a similar design language, but each with enough different to not feel like a rehash. I am also impressed with the small handful of releases from Bridgeport Knife Co and Asher Knives. They make stuff, again, that has similar design language, but is functionally different.

There are ways to fight counterfeiting. An excellent article from the Harvard Business Review, found here, lays out how do to this. Part of the approach, of course, is to hire a lawyer. But that can been ineffective and expensive, even for the largest brands. The other steps outlined in the piece are more applicable to the knife industry.

One thing the article discusses is the hollowing out of a brand. If the days of bespoke goods are behind a brand and instead they are getting things mass produced overseas and then slapping their logo on it, they are ripe for counterfeiting. The reason is simple and relevant to our discussion here—if all that distinguishes a brand’s product is the logo and not the quality, then it is easier to copy their stuff. One way to fight this, especially in the knife market, would be to STOP using overseas OEMs. That might be impractical for some, but there are very high end and cost-effective OEMs here in the US. This offers two advantages. First, your item would still be made in America. Second, the entire transaction is covered by US law making counterfeiting more difficult. While it may be tempting to take advantage of cheaper labor costs in China, this is a Faustian bargain for small makers. Moving production to the US offers real advantages.

The second thing that the knife industry could do is to engage in true high end craftsmanship with these self-published blades. When Gucci, Hermes, and others stopped making things by way of skilled craftsman and instead have things batched out overseas, the value proposition for counterfeiting makes more sense. If the Gucci bag isn’t better made, the materials are the same, and the country of origin for both the original and knockoff are the same, why pay more? The logo? If some Chinese OEM is making your knife for you, you sell it and then a dead on knockoff appears on Ali Baba a year later, again, where is the value added? If you used a Chinese OEM to produce copies of your original design, how can you add value compared to another Chinese OEM producing copies of your original design, albeit without your permission? See the problem? If these high end knives are just a CAD drawing plus a Chinese OEM, what is the maker adding that has value to a consumer, especially once the innovation of the design has been used over and over again for other designs by the same maker? As they put it in the article: logos are easy to knockoff, but high end craftsmanship is not. One way is to give consumers options so that even if the knife isn’t a true bespoke item there is still some individuality. And I don’t mean the standard ultem, green micarta, and CF handle choices. How about some hand rubbed finishes? How about some custom ano on the handle? How about hand sharpened edges? Touches that tailor a knife to a person are hard to do, but losing market share to knockoffs is worse. I think back to those early batches of TRM knives sharpened by RJ Martin or when Allen Elishewitz was doing Hogue grinds and that seems like a great way to prevent knockoffs. Unless the Chinese can clone RJ Martin, having him sharpen your blades can’t be faked.

Third, there is the idea of complexity and quality as a bar to counterfeiting. If you are making a complex, high quality, innovative knife, the chance that a knockoff could be made that is functionally identical AND cheaper is low. If you use high end steel, the knockoff probably can’t do the same for significantly less. They can lie about the steel, but only a few weeks of use can expose bad steels. If you have an innovative mechanism, it is probably less easy to reproduce cheaply. No one, including US makers, was able to make the Poehlmann lock (the Axial lock) to scale, so I doubt it could knocked off effectively. But even if the knockoffs COULD make the item functionally identical doing so would be so expensive that it would not be that much cheaper. And if the knockoff and the real thing are roughly the same price, the choice for the consumer is easier. But if you have a generic steel and a standard TFF (titanium frame lock flipper), you’re going to get ripped off. Your knife is nothing more than a target. M390 is not enough anymore.

This point goes back to a debate I had with Mr. Scurvy about custom versus production knives. He believed that there were certain things that production knives could never replicate. I think that is true with one caveat—production knives cannot replicate the custom experience AT SCALE. If humans can build rockets that send people to the moon, they could make a production process that produced perfect versions of custom knives. They would cost as much or more than the custom originals, but with current technology, we could made a run of identical King Tut daggers. They’d cost $8,000,000 but it is possible, just not commercially sustainable.

The last thing I think knife makers could do to fight the knockoffs is change the drop model currently being used. I wrote about why it was bad in the TW Price Response article, but let me explain a bit more in this context. Suppose you make the new hotness and issue a drop of 500 knives, which is a pretty standard order size. It sells like hotcakes and then you need time to order and make and ship another batch. A year goes by and the demand you built up is still waiting. Well, 3 months after your big splash, there will be a knockoff and it will absorb that demand. If, instead, the batch is large or continuously being made, then you get the pent up demand, not the counterfeiter. The problem is this is very expensive. Only a few small batch makers can do this. Instead, what I think makers need to do is look at each drop as the “final” drop. Knife A hits, 500 are sold, and then you move on to Knife B, knowing that Knife A is going to be counterfeited, but the demand for your stuff transfers to Knife B, not the counterfeiters.

There will always be knockoffs, but the true bulwark against them is making something that simply can’t be replicated cheaply. Sure there are cheap drop point hunters, but there are no knockoffs that are identical to a Loveless. There is an irreducible amount of time and skill needed to make that knife what it is. Even the best copies made on a production scale aren’t the same. All of this is to say that the best guard against knockoffs is work and insight and creativity. The reality is very few people have those things on a consistent basis. Ultimately, I think the market is experiencing a contraction and it is one that is inevitable. Knifemaking is hard. Being a knife company is hard. For a while, it wasn’t. You didn’t even have to know how to grind a knife to start your own brand. You just needed a computer and the ability to use CAD. Then you could send your design overseas and get a wave of knives to sell. Now you need more, and counterfeiting is one of the reasons why. An evaporation of demand is the other. People mistakenly thought that the difficult part was production. The difficult part is that spark of originality that makes your work different from everyone else’s and sustaining and nuturing that spark over time.

Here is a new issue in this old debate—economics. Our country is going through economic upheaval right now. Things are going to get worse before they get better. Tariffs simply do not work the way that some people think they do. They never have. When you add to that still problematic levels of inflation, crippling financial situations on the state and municipal level, and a shocking reversal in the job market, things are going to get very tight. Excess money to spend on stuff like new knives is going to be in short supply. The makers that can weather this storm are going to need to go to one extreme or the other. They need to make really high end stuff or stuff for the masses. The days of selling $600 overseas made knives is probably over, especially when they cost 20% more due to tariffs.