It occurred to me recently that you can look at the major knife manufacturers in one of two ways--those that iterate and those that innovate. This is a gross simplification, of course, and really a spectrum (the new version of the Axis lock is clearly an innovation in that it is new, but it is not really that different from the old Axis lock), but put those things aside and look through this particular lens with me for a moment.

On the side of iteration we have two companies--Benchmade and Spyderco. These two companies have a core set of design ideas and they use them over and over again on their knives. For Benchmade it is a lock and for Spyderco it is a deployment method. On the other side, innovation, we have Kershaw and CRKT. They produce dozens of new designs every year with little to no continuity with the past. We may get a new steel in an old design, but very rarely do these companies revisit a design (the M16 from CRKT being a notable exception).

So, using this lens, and recognizing that it is a warped and limited perspective (I happen to think Spyderco is quite inventive with their designs), which produces better knives?

I think you have to favor iteration on a per knife basis. Sure, Kershaw with their 40 new designs a year is bound to hit on some of them and get something in the 17 or 18 out of 20 range, but for those gleaming jewels of design and implementation it takes practice. Just browse through the Spyderco catalog and look at their evergreen products--the Delica, the Endura, the Centofante III, the Dragonfly, the Native 5, the Paramilitary II...all of them are amazing knives, well above average. Now compare that to the Kershaw catalog where you have a lot of good, but not great knives. Those knives in the Kershaw line up that have been allowed to evolve, such as the Cryo, have become very good blades indeed. The G10 Cryo is leagues better than the slippery turd that is the stainless steel version.

Similarly, the G10 Zing, a Big Box exclusive, is amazing. But among these select few, Kershaw pumps out virtually interchangeable designs with a few tweaks. Can you, without looking, tell me the difference between the Showtime and the Entropy or the Rove and the Grid?

But this is not the only way to look at knives. If a businessman was speaking, he'd tell you that the "fast fail" is the way to go. In this way knife companies are imitating a high tech start up--they make a bunch of stuff, send it out in the market, and see what sticks, and then iterate on that. The market is the testing group. This has two advantages--one obvious and one not so obvious. First, the test group is massive, allowing for kinks in a design to be found faster and more effectively. I am sure Kershaw does internal QC testing, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the "is this a good product" testing comes from us. Second, you get to charge folks to be part of your test group. Instead of doing a lot of internal testing and weeding out lesser designs, Kershaw sends out 40 new knives a year, some fail and some don't, but everyone that wants to test one out to see if they like it, has to buy one. Folks that read this blog aren't "one knife" people. They recognize that they will do a lot of catch and release in the process of building a stable of blades they like and can rely on. Kershaw feeds this impulse by making a metric ton of new stuff every year.

CRKT does this too, but more with mechanisms and locks than Kershaw does. CRKT releases at least two or three new systems a year, whether it is deployment mechanisms or locks. It's clockwork. The Homefront, just announced at Blade, has a toolless tear down system. Personally, I find this innovation more interesting than two dozen flippers that have different colors and blade shapes, but it is more risky from a business perspective. While Kershaw is grooving in one pitch after another into basically the same part of the strike zone, thus guaranteeing a modicum of sales success, CRKT is throwing pitches all over the place. Consumers, like batters, are potentially thrown off balance. Great stuff, like the Eraser, can slip buy in a flurry of new acronyms.

But this debate has focused on folks that are, while caricatured for purposes of this article, in the middle of the spectrum--Spyderco is pretty innovative and CRKT has enough variants of the M16 to show they like iteration. At the extreme tail end, we have the moribund corpses of iteration and five year old with ADHD of innovation.

Chris Reeve represents the most extreme of the iteration model. At Blade 2016, they just announced the Large Inkosi. I had parodied this a few posts ago, saying they were working on a new, slightly different sized Inkosi called the Iripzuoff, and guess what, it turned out to be true. Let's walk through this. First, they made the Sebenza, large and small. Then they made the 21, in both sizes.

Then they made the 25, only as a large. Then they made the Inkosi. Now we have the Large Inkosi. There are three blade shapes for the Sebenza--a clip point, a wharncliffe-ish thing, and a tanto. The handle comes in carbon fiber and titanium (let's ignore the inlay version for now). That's roughly eleven different versions of almost the exact same knife. Iteration in overdrive.

Then there is a company like Custom Knife Factory. They basically make production versions of custom knives and as a result, each knife is pretty much entirely different from every other knife. And some of these designs have a lot of promise. I liked the Peace Duke, for example, but the actual blade grind, with its silly multiple grinds (all but useless on a knife this size) killed the design for me. If CKF iterated (and they do sometimes, rarely) they could tweak this design and make it something more practical. They remind me of the dogs from Up, just one second away from losing their attention and looking at something else, except instead of squirrels, they are smitten with titanium framelock flippers. "Flipper!"

From a business standpoint, the Kershaw model of innovation and consumer-based product testing, is probably the best way to go. It generate a ton of revenue, feeds the knife addiction, and, in the rare instance when one blade rises to the top, it gives you clear direction on which knife and how to iterate. But from a consumer perspective, I'd much rather the Spyderco path of iteration. I'd lump Benchmade in here too, but they are perhaps too far over on the spectrum, closer to Chris Reeve than Spyderco. Over a long process of distilling good design and listening to consumer feedback you arrive a gems, polished by years of iteration. The Dragonfly 2 is one of these gems. The new G10 Mini Grip, the 555-1 is another.

Each is a truly sublime blade, something that even the best designers are unlike to stumble upon in their first go round. It may be slow, it may result in a boring line up (I'm look at you Benchmade), but the end results are some of the finest folding knives in the world.