It’s important to stay sharp through the years, especially at a knife-making company such as Southern Pines-based Spartan Blades.
After selling 30,000 blades since founding the business in an old mule barn in 2008,
Curtis Iovito and Mark Carey keep the company honed through a dedication to excellence and growth.
Most recently, they added the Euro Blade Worx, or EBX, a branch of the company which expands Spartan’s reach into the European market. The joint venture with Czech knife designer Ondřej Němec was born from a series of challenges that are common for American knife makers.
“Whenever we sell knives into Europe, they’re almost double in price — they’re not cheap here in the U.S.,” says Iovito. “People just can’t afford to pay it.”
That comes from shipping costs, import taxes and the EU’s value-added tax, which is a consumer-side tax applied at each stage of the good’s supply chain.
Iovito says Spartan has grown its market share in Europe since it first visited the IWA OutdoorClassics trade show in Nuremberg, Germany, about 10 years ago.
“(Europeans) have a big outdoor camping culture, so a lot of people carry knives, [for] hunting, camping,” says Iovito. “It’s one of the largest outdoor trade shows in the world. So we figured, ‘Hey, we need to go.’
“They loved our knives. They love American quality when it comes to outdoor stuff, whether it’s tents, socks, underwear or knives.”
Spartan Blades’ quality led to relationships with European dealers and dedicated customers, both for utility and collectors.
Iovito and Carey are former Special Forces soldiers, with more than 40 years of combined military service. After pursuing knife-making as a business, it was their goal to make the highest quality knives for combat, producing a reliable tool for soldiers and civilians alike.
They considered the Yarborough knife as a premier example, and reached out to Chris Reeve Knives in Idaho, which makes the knives exclusively for the Army to award to freshly forged Green Berets.
“We called them, and said, ‘Hey, we’re two guys — just got out of the Army — we’re looking to start a business,’” says Iovito “‘We want to make knives and wondered if you would help us out?’
“And they said, ‘Absolutely.’”
Iovito and Carey visited the Idaho facility, and came away days later with a leg-up in their process, and a connection to the industry “family” that they still value.
That connection led to meeting with William W. Harsey Jr. and the company’s first collaboration with a world-renowned blade designer. The Spartan-Harsey Model I garnered the company its first award.
The company’s growth has continued, sometimes as much as 400% year-over-year,
Iovito says.
In the late 2010s, he and Carey developed a relationship with John Stitt, the CEO of Olean, New York-based KA-BAR, which is considered a legendary company by knife lovers. Iovito and Carey converted Spartan Blades’ assets into a new corporation called Pineland Cutlery.
“We sat down, had a meeting, and we showed them our books,” says Iovito. “We can tell you in 2009 how many green handles we sold on a knife, and we keep exacting records. We told them that, and I think there was a little bit of eye rolling, and then we
showed them.”
In 2019, KA-BAR bought half of the company. Iovito and Carey declined to disclose company finances.
Even KA-BAR has been hampered by the European trade system. As Spartan Blades became known in Europe and throughout the world, Carey and Iovito struggled to gain military contracts around the European Union because of one overriding factor.
“Three different contracts in Europe we bid on,” says Iovito. “All three times the competition came down to us and one other knife. Well the knife manufactured in Europe always won.”
In recent years, the Spartan founders have explored ways to move some manufacturing to the EU. They searched in Italy, where an award-winning consortium operates in Mantego, but its necessary markup would repeat Spartan’s original problem. Manufacturers in Germany say their costs are already too high to quote work for new lines.
“We finally realized, ‘Hey, we found it here in North Carolina, maybe we just should do it ourselves,’” says Iovito. “And we’re not moving any manufacturing from here. We just want to sell more in Europe.”
So they made an offer to Němec, who agreed to run a manufacturing facility as EBX’s managing director, making Spartan and KA-BAR knives for the European market. The team began setting up the facility about a year ago.
It remains too early to tell how successful they’ll be. “It’s far too early for sales projections in the EU as we are just finishing our first production knives now,” Iovito says.
Expanding U.S. offerings has been another priority. The merger with KA-BAR gave them access to broader production capabilities, and they added silver pro-grade blades, which are produced in New York by KA-BAR, and bronze field-grade ones, produced in Taiwan. They now use the term gold, or elite grade, for the original line of knives, still manufactured in North Carolina with Crucible Particle Metal steel.
The elite grade is manufactured at sites in Moore County, where they have 10 employees, Union County, High Point and Greensboro. They order the specialty steel from Akron, New York-based Niagara Specialty Metals.
“We bring it to Monroe. We water-jet all the blanks out. We take it here (Southern Pines) and machine them just across town here. Take them to High Point for heat treat, Greensboro for coating, bring them back here and then we do all the assembly, laser marking, sharpening shipping and send it out,” says Iovito.
Zoning regulations prevent them from manufacturing at their Southern Pines headquarters, Iovito says. Visitors are often surprised when they don’t find a factory, he adds.
Němec will be overseeing the gold line in South Moravia in the Czech Republic, where they have six employees.
“This is more than a factory — it’s a knife-making and logistics hub designed for the next generation,” he said in a news release. “We’re blending European manufacturing tradition with American design innovation to serve a truly international community.”
Iovito says the designs coming out of EBX will be unique, utilizing Němec’s skills and knowledge of the region.
“It’s amazing the amount of people that’ll travel to knife collecting meetups and build out their collections,” said Iovito. “ Part of making knives in Europe, that are specific to Europe with slightly different designs, is the collectors have new things to collect, and they can interface with other people they normally wouldn’t. Because really it is a culture.”
That process started in early July with the Willow, a variation on the Enyo, a small, fixed-blade knife that sells well in Europe.
“It’s the easiest model for us to make first,” Iovito says. “As we train our people and progress, we can do knives that get a little more difficult over time.” Plans call for three fixed-blade knives, and then a folding knife.
Back stateside, Pineland Cutlery is planning to expand into kitchen and home utility, including titanium chopsticks the company made in its early days, along with wine tools and steak and chef’s knives.
“We’re doing them a bit different, higher-end,” said Carey. “They’ll have carbon fiber handles, silver tool handles — they’ll match modern kitchens.”
For the time being, Spartan and KA-BAR will focus on ramping up sales of knives made in the U.S. Once EBX’s production has smoothed, they will look to expand distribution partnerships with other knife brands with an eye on the European market.
“(The new initiative) is going to tighten ties between us and people [in Europe]” says Iovito. “What we want to do is take American manufacturing excellence, and just show everybody else, ‘Here, look what the Americans can do.’” ■
This story first appeared in The (Southern Pines) Pilot.
