Reviewing the Sharp by Design Void focused me on an issue that I think is relatively unusual in the landscape of consumer goods. We have reached an inflection point. There are luxe knives and performance knives, as opposed to, say, the car world where luxe cars are, generally performance cars as well (even the RR Phantom reaches 155 MPH) reaches . The divergence between the two is getting bigger. This isn’t a “production versus custom” debate, but a realization that for some folks knife cutting performance doesn’t matter.

In one way, this is because even the most minimally acceptable knife is pretty decent these days. You can totally ignore performance and if you pick a reputable brand and halfway decent design, you will get a good cutter. But elite performance is quite often completely detached from a luxury experience (note: The Void was the spark for this article because it is, by far, the best performing Reate I have reviewed).

Before we get into the weeds let me cut off an objection now—often people will say “Well, really, what does it matter? Most people don’t do tasks that require a high performance slicing knife.” This is from the same family of objections to steel snobs, the “why do you need a high performance steel to open Amazon boxes?” But here, with cutting performance, there really is a good reason. For me there are two common tasks I do with knives: opening things and food prep. In food prep a good slicer really does matter. Having a thin, well-ground knife makes a huge difference when peeling an apple or slicing cheese. I also think this is a pretty common scenario. As such I think this objection, in this one case, fails.

Let’s take two different brands dominating the knife market right now: TRM and Reate.

Reate has clearly pushed the boundaries of what production knives can look and feel like. It has also pushed the boundary of how much large-scale (read: not Rockstead) production knives can cost. But even now five years into their run, I have yet to handle Reate that was an elite performer. They all flip nice, but a few of them carry poorly, either because of their weight or their terrible clip. A few have edges to close to the spine. And almost none of them cut all that well. The Void, which is about as good a cutter from Reate I have handled, is only in the top 30th percentile or so of cutters. There is just no way to get a slice edge if you start off with slab blade stock. Reate knives are about bling and perfectionist machining. That’s cool in the same way that a mechanical watch is cool, but for me and a large contingent of the knife market (though not quite as large a percentage of the IKC), we’d rather have elite performance than perfectionist machining.

TRM, which is no slouch on machining, represents the other pole in this dichotomy—absolutely relentless focus on performance. I have handled the abandoned luxe line of TRM blades—the Lightfoot Turbos I saw on my factory tour—and they were unquestionably as good as any Reate I have seen in terms of machining. But TRM purposely decided to not go that route. Instead they have focused (like a water jet) on mid-priced knives that offer unrivaled performance. Their knives carry brilliantly, are excellent in the hand, and cut like obsidian scalpels. Interestingly with the marbled CF Nerd and the Ti Atom, TRM doesn’t eschew bling or higher end materials, but even on those knives performance comes first and bling comes second.

This is the difference between something like a Cadillac Escalade (the Reate) and the Ariel Atom (the TRM). If you had $80,000 to spend you could get either, but only one of them can rival a $5 million Pagani in terms of handling, braking, and lap times. Reate’s model, I fear, is about to come crashing down because of the Covid-19 economic fall out, but in reality, there is only so far you can go down the road of making bling. A knife is a tool and tools that focus on performance will always win out.