Walmart will make another competitive knife.

You don’t get to be the God Emperor of Logistics at random. Even though we are a tiny, tiny niche hobby, the OT has sold well enough for long enough that I am sure the data miners at Walmart have noticed and my guess is we will get another well-made knife with decent materials for super mega cheap. The days of knife-shaped objects with mystery meat steel are over at the King of Bentonville. Making a knife as nice as the OT is not particularly hard, especially for a company with annual revenue of more than $600 billion. They can basically crap out a decent knife, sell it for 1/4 what even the cheapest competitors are, and still make a profit on it. If they release onesies and twosies I think the knife market will be okay. If they get aggressive and release a whole line including a “high end” knife with some crazy good steel for like $30, then I think the knife market as we know it is over. But fortunately, the former is more likely than the latter.

Let’s be frank about this—Walmart could crush the entire knife business in a heartbeat. Walmart makes more in a day than Crucible and Boehler Uddeholm AG make in a year COMBINED. By a factor of 4. Carpenter is part of a much larger company that provides all sorts of industrial technology. They are truly massive, dwarfing the largest knife producer (Fiskars, which makes Gerber, has an annual revenue of $1.27 billion dollars) with an annual revenue of $2.7 billion dollars. Walmart is 300 times their size. If Walmart wanted to throw their weight around, there is literally nothing any or all companies in the knife business could do to stop them.

And this doesn’t even factor in what happens if the Lord of the Internet, the other $600 billion gorilla, decides to make an Amazon Essentials folder that is good. These two companies alone make more money in a year than Saudi Arabia does—and they have all that oil. Both Amazon and Walmart make more money in a year than Sweden. If they were countries and not companies their annual revenue was converted to GDP, that would make either of them rank 22nd in terms of GDP ahead of large and wealthy countries like Sweden, Austria, Israel, the UAE, Argentina, and Ireland. In other words, as knife enthusiasts let’s hope Walmart and/or Amazon don’t decide to raid the knife industry.

Such is the current global economic imbalance—our lives and interests are nothing more than the whims and playthings of oligarchs.

US Production Companies will beat overseas knives in terms of IKC interest.

Its been a while now that US companies have been consolidating designs, upgrading steels, and paying attention to trends. It used to be that they were just overwhelmed by the innovation coming from overseas, especially in the area of self-published blades, but the tides have turned. Self-published blades are, to put it mildly, in a massive rut and the stuff shown off at SHOT Show 2025 (ten notables coming next week) look amazing. The Provoke x Axe and the Sage 6 in S90V alone look better than any of the self-published blades out there. Of course we still see WAY TOO MUCH 8Cr(ap) steel from some US companies, but even that seems to be abating. When you consider small production companies like Koenig, Machinewise, Oz, and TRM, I think we will see a rebirth of US made stuff while the overseas stuff enters its gilded lily phase.

Blade stock will get thinner.

Triple H was a consultant for Stephen Amell’s wrestling drama Heels. During an interview, Stephen said that Triple H gave him one piece of advice about working in the ring—slow it down. He said, essentially, when you get in there, slow it down to half speed. Then see how the crowd reacts and slow it down again. And when you think you can’t go any slower, slow it down one more time. Wrestling is story telling and building to a climax is the key to telling a great story (and great other stuff…).

If I were giving advice to knife companies about knife design, I would borrow this idea when talking about blade stock. Overwhelmingly, blade geometry determines a knife’s performance and the single biggest factor there is blade thickness. So if you want a knife to slice like a laser, make the blade stock thin. If you think it is thin enough, cut it in half. Once there, do it again. The days of CHONKY boys being accepted because the IKC didn’t know better and wanted as much Mall Ninja shit as possible are over. We have the steel. We have the market forces. We have more than a hundred years of traditional folders that tell us thin works best. So MAKE BLADES THIN AGAIN.

But here is the real kicker and why I think this will happen—its cheaper. Steel is basically sold by volume and thin stock is cheaper than thick stock. So when the highest performance option is the CHEAPER option, companies will take that path. Thin is in.

We will get a new top end steel.

Its about time. Magnacut has stood at the top of the heap for almost two years, something that is unheard of in the modern cutlery business, but it is about time for that to change. I don’t want or need a new steel, to be clear, but the popularization of MIM tech seems to presage a new age of knife steels. The Magpul Breslau runs metal injected molded S35VN for a blade with amazing details and no waste. That alone seems like a good reason for companies to change over to something new.

The FSA will fall and there will be a boom in autos.

This is more of a hope than a prediction, but we do have an unprecedented alignment of political forces that make 2025 the most likely year yet to spell the end of the dumbest law in knifedom—the Federal Switchblade Act. With pro-2A forces controlling the White House and all three legislative branches (yes, let’s not kid ourselves, the modern Supreme Court is an utter failure as an institution and is nothing more than the US’s smallest and least informed legislature), the FSA should die an ignominious death this year. That, in turn, will lead to an explosion of autos. These knives are pretty easy to make and will sell very, very well for a while, so why not? In the same way that the tobacco industry was ready for the legalization of marijuana, knife companies are undoubtedly sitting on terabytes of CAD files for autos. Let’s go.