Knvr was founded, as all great businesses are, on a core philosophy. That philosophy, like the deepest philosophies, was born out of the immediacy of lived experience. It is a philosophy of space: the philosophy that everyone is free to cultivate their own space as they see fit regardless of their resources and of the dictates of popular taste. It is, as you well know by now, one that is deeply personal to me.

It came into focus all the way back in my early 20s, when the concept of personal space took on new meaning. I was in a new city and finished moving into my first real apartment. After getting all the necessities in order—all the furniture, the flat screen, the mood lighting, the glassware, blah blah blah—I found the space to be particularly soulless. The walls were a pale, almost medical green. Painting them cream yellow didn’t do much to add character. I was too mature for posters and not yet sentimental enough for family or friend photos. Yet all I had to decorate my walls with was a freshly acquired humanities degree that I wasn’t getting much use out of otherwise.

I knew it didn’t have to be this way, but I couldn’t see a way out. My means for interior decoration were as limited as the endorphins I got from flipping Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware catalogs. And other people my age were similarly struggling. A crisis of self-definition loomed for my generation. It meant getting creative or dying, in an aesthetic manner of speaking. I scoped out flea markets and thrift stores for discarded objects that could pass as art. I found a wood-carved Jesus with missing hands and a typewriter with only one surviving key (the F). With the odd floral or sad clown painting, however, that lent an aloof yet folksy museum quality. Nothing so far acquired amounted to an extension of who I was and what life meant to me.

Then, one night walking from a bar it happened. Or rather I happened upon it. I got lost down an alleyway when I tripped and fell. “Sorry!” I slurred, thinking it was a person. It was actually a box. When I shined my phone over it I saw a gleaming pattern. A beautiful cascade of knives. Just sitting there this whole time! Perhaps in a past life they were fairly mundane cutlery, but in that moment they exuded a striking aura of mystery that seemed to change the atmosphere around me. If that could happen in an alley, I reasoned, there’s no limit to what it can do in a legitimate residence. To the barren, yellowish apartment they went!

Here began our adventure, though not without a few initial bumps. There was no decorative knife community to speak of at the time. It was just me and this box of sharp objects. Soon though there was a power drill, then there was some string. Then I had them hanging along my living room wall, just above my sidewalk sofa. It wasn’t perfect. Frankly they looked like birthday letters. But the potential was there, and so was the purpose. Pretty soon I was scouring the greater metropolitan area for all of its orphaned cutlery and then trying to find ways to, um, carve out my space with them. (Sorry!) My friends took notice and thought they could do with similar accents. With that, the decorative knife community became a reality and Knvr became the commercial center of that community.

My pride in what we have built together is without bottom, but not as bottomless as my thanks for the faith you’ve put in my running this business with integrity. So it is with still bottomless regret that I write this to you, our community of #knivers.

We are confronted with sensitive issues regarding our quality control that strike at the heart of our space-positive philosophy. In-house counsel has advised me against going into detail, but the long and short of it is that some self-professed #knifestyle “influencers” have taken it upon themselves to live out our decorative credo of self-expression some ways beyond the utmost limit, not to mention publicly. While we emphasize that Knvr’s knives are exclusively for decorative purposes, it appears that we’ve created a loophole in what constitutes a decorative surface. I admit we’ve tried to be, um, on the cutting edge of that concept ourselves. Consider our table centerpiece the corktangle, or the ridged birdbath, or the knife-only charcuterie board. All exemplary products fitting the arc of our vision, but all sadly discontinued until further notice.

There is probably a better name for these people than “influencer,” but it’s clear they’ve brought negative publicity onto the company and distress upon the decorative knife community as a whole. Rest assured that I will not allow stigma to take hold over us on the count of some bad actors. I know that you know I don’t condone excess experimentation. And you know that I know that Knvr has the most enthusiastic and ethically sound customer base a company could ever want. Sometimes I long for the days when R&D was just me, even as I was also accounting, marketing, Human Resources, custodial staff, and sometimes legal. I’d love that feeling of control. But businesses need to expand to survive, and more expansion means less control. I can’t control who takes our philosophy too much to heart, but I can try to set things right so we can learn and grow from it.

But I can’t do it alone. I’m calling on all #knivers for assistance.

First we must prove to the world that we are not what they claim us to be. We have empathy, and the basic understanding that some decorative surfaces have certain rights by which they can refuse decorative consent. Knvr is donating an as-yet-undetermined percentage of its proceeds to pre-decorative restoration efforts or like compensations regarding these events. We will be including a QR code across our socials to encourage you to do the same. Second is that quality control goes both ways. In the coming weeks we plan to make revisions to our use policies that will establish boundaries and clarify best practices. Once we unroll them we encourage you to take them to heart and to instill them amongst each other in this new and exciting phase of our expansion.

Finally is that we should keep things in perspective. When times get tough, as they often are when running a business, I take inspiration from the very product we make. Knives are not only objects of unrivaled beauty but of astonishing efficiency—they can go through anything. I see us as one great big knife, getting through this together.

Best,

The (extremely yet ethically decorative) Blade Master