Inside a one-story cinderblock workshop in Orlando, a small team of craftsmen have found themselves at the center of a seemingly permanent buying craze. The workers are forging, grinding, and affixing handles to a product so sought-after that the waiting list to buy one stretches to seven years long, and is likely growing longer.
“It’s nuts,” said Jason Randall, 55, the current head of Randall Made Knives. He’s the grandson of the founder, Bo Randall, who founded the company in 1938. “I’m booking for October 2031 right now,” Randall said. Ask about this growing backlog of customers, eager to spend $500 or more on these handmade hunting, survival, and military knives, and you won’t hear him celebrating.
“Right now we’re about six months past our scheduled ship date,” he told Fortune. “It’s not good.”
Randall wants his customers using the knives, not waiting for them. And plenty of customers want that too. Anyone who’s taken Econ 101 knows a company making a product this popular could rid itself of that waiting list—and make more money—by jacking up prices.
“I can’t ever see doing that,” Randall says. Prices have crept upward as labor and materials have grown more expensive, but the company won’t increase prices just because the demand is sky-high.
We’ll get to why Randall refuses to price its wares to cash in on that demand: The reason may offer lessons for any business selling products that have a certain mystique, or that have won over enthusiastic customers. But first—if you don’t happen to be a student of high-end fixed blades—it’s worth spending a minute unpacking the Randall mystique.
Randalls have been a favored blade among soldiers, generals, astronauts, and future presidents. The knives are mentioned in the lyrics of popular songs and collected by museums. Ronald Reagan owned one as a young captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces. General William Westmoreland wore one strapped to his hip in Vietnam. NASA commissioned a special line of survival knives from Randall for the Mercury astronauts to take on the first manned flights into space. One of those knives—a tool NASA intended for remote crash landings, not space combat, by the way—made it into the collection at the Smithsonian Institution.
For those who know, Randall is the Leica—or Rolex—of handmade knives, as much touchstone as tool within the culture. Or a slice of the culture, anyway. I’ve never heard a country music song dedicated to German cameras or Swiss watches. But Nashville stars Steve Earle and Vince Gill both recorded their own versions of a poetic ode to a Randall knife. The revered Texas songwriter Guy Clark wrote that song—and recorded what may be the best version—after inheriting a Randall fighting knife that belonged to his father.
“If you ever held a Randall knife, you knew my father well,” Clark sang. “If a better blade was ever made, it was probably forged in hell.”
Randalls have been carried by U.S. service members heading off to World War II, Afghanistan, and most of the conflicts in between. “Purchasing a Randall knife is buying a piece of Americana,” longtime knife dealer Dave Harvey told Fortune. Harvey runs Boise-based Nordic Knives, which bills itself as “America’s most reliable and trustworthy source of fine custom knives.” Nordic does about $2.5 million in business per year, and Randall has been one of the dealer’s most beloved brands since 1977.
“It’s a status knife in the military.” Harvey said. “There’s a lot of Special Forces operators who don’t think you’re complete without a Randall knife and Rolex watch.”
Randall also inspires devotion inside its own workshop. The company headcount currently stands at 19 employees, and some of them have been with Randall for most of their working lives. The shop supervisor, Scott Maynard, said he started back in 1983, at age 19, doing newbie jobs like sweeping floors and stacking knife handles.
“They used to call me ‘boy,’ now they call me ‘old man,’” Maynard said. “I tell you what, once you get started here and get rooted, it’s really hard to leave.”
Part of the draw, he says, is working on a product that carries the subtle stamp of each person who built it. In an age when automated CNC machining is within reach of even small metalworking operations, Randall’s knifemakers still hold each blade against the abrasive wheels by hand, and shape the famously precise grind lines to match the patterns they know by heart.
“It’s astounding that everything is done by eye,” Maynard said. “There’s a little bit of individuality that each guy kind of puts into the knives.”
Take the Randall Model 1, for example. Along the back spine of each blade, the metal dips just before it hits the handle, forming a notch called a top choil. When Maynard was still making Model 1s, he liked to grind his top choils a little deeper in front and trail off at the end, giving it a pleasing swoosh shape that reminded him of the Nike logo. Every once in a while, he said, one of those knives pops up in the shop to be serviced.
“So when these knives that I shaped back in the ’80s and early ’90s come in, I can tell,” he said. “It’s got a Nike swoosh, so, okay—I know who did this knife!”
As Maynard describes it, the Randall way leaves employees room for an individual touch, holds them to a high standard, and rewards them for doing so. The lowest wage in the workshop, for brand-new hires, is $17 per hour. The highest is $50 per hour. Maynard said that since the time of Gary Randall—son of founder Bo, father of current boss Jason—the company has covered half the cost of employees’ health insurance premiums.
“For my family, it was $400, $500 a week, and Gary was paying half of that.” Maynard said. “And whatever we’re making, Gary put eight and a half percent of that into a retirement account. Out of his pocket, for us… It’s unheard of for a small company.”
Visit the Randall shop these days, and you may well run into Gary Randall. “My dad claims he’s retired and he still comes in every day,” said Jason Randall, who seems to have inherited his father’s work ethic. “I’ve worked in the shop since 1989. Two weeks off after graduation and I’ve been here ever since.”
Jason Randall’s main preoccupation these days is whittling down that backlog of enthusiastic buyers. “I spend a fair amount of my day dealing with customers,” he said. “I don’t want to tell somebody that we’re seven years booked.”
Customers are free to put down their $50 deposit and start the seven-year clock, but Jason Randall said he’ll often recommend that people go to one of Randall’s trusted dealers instead. These sellers reserve monthly allotments of Randall’s production years in advance, and sell the knives with varying rates of markup.
What Randall won’t consider is raising his own prices just because he can. “It would drive people away, and we don’t want to drive people away,” he said.
“We always want to be at that point where someone would say ‘Damn, this is an awesome knife,’” Randall said. “‘Did I spend more than if I went to Walmart? Yeah, but this is something that I can pass on to future generations.’ I just don’t want to force people out of the market for a quality handmade knife.”
Plenty of these knives spend their lives on the collector’s shelf. Raise the price and the waiting list might disappear. But the brand enjoys a mystique because gutsy, active users take Randalls with them on dangerous adventures. People like that aren’t necessarily rich. Price them out and Randall loses perhaps its most important feature. The knives become showpieces rather than tools, and sacrifice the very mystique that made them famous. Which may be why Randall has decided it won’t change a thing.
“Exactly right,” said Harvey, the knife dealer. “They might damage their brand if they did something like that.”
