The Redstone

Everyone in the backcountry needs a pocket knife, but there are few that you can both trust and blend seamlessly alongside the rest of your gear. The opportunity we saw with the Redstone was to make a small, lightweight knife that you could toss in your pack and basically forget about (until you really need it), but that had more premium materials, and was full-featured. The Redstone features our very first formed-wire pocket clip, a hand-hold grip design, an ambi-dextrous slide lock mechanism, and a partially serrated blade.

We developed the Redstone with professional rock climber and photographer Savannah Cummins. She gave us a great insight; there are always three things in the top of her pack: a Bic lighter, some lip balm, and a small pocket knife. The thing about a pocket knife is that you never know when you are going to need it, but when you need it– you really need it. No other tool will do the job. Making one that is small enough to make the cut when you are packing your gear, but useful enough for hard and repeated work is a difficult undertaking. That was the mission of the Redstone.

Savannah is a rock climber, and rock holds, especially those inside climbing gyms have a very particular set of forms that are designed to maximize grip and surface area for fingers. This was our second insight. Grip on pocket knives is always an issue; imagine the consequences of dropping your wet pocket knife from a rock outcropping hundreds of feet off the ground. Could we use the concept of “holds” to make a small knife with great grip?

This “hold” concept gave us the chance to have some more fun with color, as that is always one of the things that is challenging in the pocket knife space: the general materials palette doesn’t allow for much exploration, but injected “holds” could really open things up.