The Company That Got Its Name on the Way to the Post Office: Spartan Blades

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In early 2008, two retired Special Forces guys cleaned out a barn and made thirty knives.

An old Special Forces friend named Jason bought the first one. Then they hit a problem neither of them had considered, which was that neither had ever actually mailed anything. Their wives had always handled that.

So they wrapped the knife in an MRE box, taped it up with green hundred mile an hour tape, and got in the car to go ask the lady at the post office how to ship it.

On the drive, Mark looked at the package and said this is a Spartan way of doing things.

Curtis said Spartan. That could be a cool name.

Spartan Knives did not ring. Spartan Blades did. They knocked knuckles in the car, drew a rough logo, and that was the company.

The month was February 2008, which is to say they quit their jobs at the exact moment the economy fell apart.

"We're like, oh my god, we quit our jobs. What have we done?"

They were told to move to Oregon

When Curtis Iovito and his partner Mark started, the advice they got was to relocate.

"They said, well, that's where all the knives are made. It's the Mecca. You can't make knives in North Carolina."

Curtis's answer was that HondaJet is built just up the road, so the state seemed capable of precision manufacturing.

He turned out to be right, and the proof is the supply chain he rattled off. Sheet steel comes in from Niagara. Water jet cutting happens in Monroe. Heat treat is at American Metal and Heat Treating in High Point. Coating is at IonBond in Greensboro, about six miles from the heat treater, close enough that the crew sorts parts by color in a parking lot between the two stops.

That last relationship exists because of the Army. Curtis and Mark knew IonBond from weapons development work on the SCAR program, which is also where they had seen a color nobody in the knife world was using.

They walked in and asked for Flat Dark Earth.

"They're like, that color doesn't exist. And we're like, yes it does. Well, how would you know about that? I said, well, we worked in the Army. Oh, okay, come on in."

Spartan made the first Flat Dark Earth knives. The industry response at the time was that nobody would buy them, because black outsells everything.

Curtis does not dispute the data. He disputes the logic.

"They're correct. It still is. But if the only color you make is black, it's always going to be your best seller."

FDE is everywhere now.

Knives that started as somebody else's requirement

A surprising number of Spartan's long-running models exist because a customer showed up with a spec sheet.

The Canadian Special Operations Forces asked them for a regimental knife, designed by Bill Harsey, who carries the moniker knife maker to the Green Berets. Spartan got that call because of history rather than marketing. Curtis and Mark came out of 1st Special Forces Group, whose lineage runs back to the First Special Service Force, the combined Canadian and American unit.

The Horkos came out of a request from the combat weapons team at West Point, who gave it to members on graduation. They have been making it about fifteen years.

The Enyo came from a provincial reconstruction team that handed over a length requirement Spartan initially thought was impossible.

"We could not figure out how to make a knife that short," Curtis said. They solved it by making you choke up on it, and the bead at the back is not only decoration, it gives your hand something to hold against. Those shipped during the initial push into Iraq, they are still in production, and because of the size they are legal in most places, which has made them a favorite in Europe.

"Sometimes people come in with a requirement and you're like, that's impossible. You try to figure it out, and every once in a while you get lucky."

Even the first knife they ever designed got rewritten by its users. The Ares started out much bigger. They handed samples to guys at Fort Bragg, who said it was beautiful and that they would never carry it.

"I'm like, what do you mean you won't carry it?"

Too big. So Spartan shrank it into something people would actually put on their belt, and it has been in the line since 2008.

Knives with intent

The company tagline sounds heavier than it is.

"It just means you should figure out what your intent is, what you want to use it for, and then buy the knife that matches your intent."

In practice it means Curtis will not answer the question he gets asked most.

"We try never to answer what knife should I buy. You obviously don't want to give them the most expensive knife, because then you look like a money gouge. So I tell them, sit down, take a day, think about what you're really going to use it for, call me back, and then I can make some recommendations."

The failure mode he sees is people buying a folder and then telling him they plan to go bushcrafting with it.

The shop, and the three Jakes

The showroom sits in a converted restaurant in a historic district, which means the building is zoned for offices and light work only. Engraving, assembly, sharpening, and customer service happen there. The heavy machinery, including five Haas mills, lives in a rental space across town.

Steel gets water jet or laser cut, dropped into the mills for rough machining, blasted in a room out back, driven to heat treat, driven to coating, brought back for laser marking, then sharpened and assembled.

Everything is built to order in small batches on a rotation, because the alternative is impossible.

"This knife has two blade colors and two sheath options. If you built ten of each just to cover those SKUs, that's forty. If we did that for every model we make, this whole building would be full of boxes."

Fixed blades run about three weeks. Folders are closer to ninety days.

The people are where this gets good. There is a Jake, a Big Jake, and a Maples whose name is also Jake. All three are left-handed. All three grew up together as kids.

That is not a coincidence, it is the hiring policy.

"The way we hire is, hey, go find someone that you trust, that you would work with, that you knew growing up, so we can trust them and they have a bond when they come here already. It makes for a tighter team."

Everyone in the building is either a military veteran or grew up locally. Craig Forester was on Curtis's first Special Forces team in Okinawa, then worked with him for another government agency in Iraq and Afghanistan. He now anodizes titanium parts, a career arc he summarized as finally being qualified.

There is a cornhole set in the office and a VFW a block away.

"There's no reason to be miserable at work."

The parts of the craft nobody films

Curtis was unusually generous about the boring middle of knife making, starting with the water jet argument.

People call it a shortcut. He says those people have never profiled a knife by hand.

"When you do water jet, you don't get a knife. You just get a better shaped starting point. The unglamorous part of knife making that nobody ever shows is profiling the outside of the knife."

It is slow, it is imprecise, and it does not make the knife better. What water jet buys is repeatability, which is what lets a sheath fit every unit instead of being molded one at a time, and which is what keeps the price where a normal person can reach it.

"If we were profiling these knives, we'd be out of business."

He was also candid about the economics.

"I think some folks would be surprised how little you make on a knife in the United States. Dealers make more on knives than we make on them."

The color work runs three different ways. You can change titanium with heat from a torch, with electrical anodizing in a tank, or with a laser, which is the most precise of the three. Curtis draws his engraving designs on an iPad, fills the color layers there, vectorizes the result into DXF files, and loads them into the laser.

Their first laser is a 50 watt machine bought about eleven years ago that has been running more or less continuously since. The newer ones do deep engraving and, in his words, eat titanium for lunch. A colored part can cycle through lasering, blasting, anodizing, and back into the laser, which is why a small pivot can take up to an hour.

Electrical anodizing has a difficulty curve most people do not know about. Bronze and blue are easy enough. Greens and high purples require a genuinely pristine part, stripped in a special solution and rinsed in distilled water first.

"Anodizing is not a direct science. It's very much an art."

Their Damascus comes from Chad Nichols and has become a much bigger part of the business than expected, running somewhere around a third of what they make and climbing. They ran out right before Blade Show this year and took the hit.

"We didn't expect Damascus to be so popular this year. But I guess if we don't have it because they all sold, that's okay."

One more detail worth stealing. Spartan sharpens blade up, which they learned from Chris Reeve and Bill Harsey.

"Every shop sharpens differently. A lot of shops struggle with the blade edge down."

Europe, and the KA-BAR that could not exist

Curtis has been bothered for years that European customers pay roughly double for the same knife.

So Spartan opened a small shop in the Czech Republic to build for that market, using European steels like Elmax that their customers there already like. He was careful about how he framed it.

"We're not moving manufacturing over there. We're just spreading what we do here. We still make the majority of our stuff in the US."

The KA-BAR collaboration came from a similar constraint. KA-BAR wanted a super steel version of their knife, but the classic is made on a giant stamping machine that a modern super steel would destroy. So Curtis asked permission to make one himself, in MagnaCut.

His rule for the project is the best analogy anyone gave me on this trip.

"KA-BARs are kind of like Monopoly. You can do Disney Monopoly, you can do different versions, but you don't change Monopoly. We're not changing the KA-BAR."

There is an FDE version, and unsurprisingly a lot of Marines have bought it.

The vault door guys

When Spartan built their building they had budget left over and asked the contractor for a safe. He said he and his father used to build banks, which sounded promising.

The vault itself took a two by four every twenty four inches to hold up the reinforced ceiling while it cured. Then he called Curtis and Mark, who were at the IWA show in Germany at the time, to say the vault door guy had arrived.

They asked him to send a picture of the install. He told them he does not install vault doors.

"I said, well, I thought you built banks. He goes, we did. And when it was time for the vault door, we would call the vault door guy."

They found a company on a laptop from Germany. By the time they got home, two men had shown up. One in his seventies, one in his eighties, and nobody else.

Curtis asked if they had someone coming to help, because it is a very large metal door.

"The old man looks at me and goes, sir, what do you do for a living? I said, well, I make knives. He goes, yeah, and I install vault doors. Why don't you make the knives and I'll install the vault doors?"

Twenty minutes. That was twelve years ago and the door still works perfectly.

"It just goes to prove everybody's good at something."

What he wants you to notice

I asked Curtis what he hopes someone feels the first time they pick up a Spartan at a show.

He went to a detail nobody would ever see. The Horkos has a flat top on it, and at some point they changed the angle by a degree and a half.

"It changed the whole knife. The feel and the look of it."

"Some people think knife design is easy. It's very difficult. You can make something large and crazy and whiz bang and people will know it was you. But when you can make it simple and they know it's you, I think that's success."

Where to buy

Spartan Blades is at spartanbladesusa.com, and there is a dealers tab at the bottom of the page.

Curtis's own recommendation is to use it.

"I always recommend buying from a dealer that's closest to you. It reduces your shipping time and cost, and you're supporting a dealer near where you live. You're not going to find the knives any cheaper from us anyway."

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The Great American Knife Tour is a three week run through 36 American shops. Watch the full playlist on YouTube, then go buy something made here.