Ben Peterson was at a family Christmas party, newly married, knowing nobody. So he turned to the guy next to him and asked what he did for a living. That conversation put him in the pocket knife business.

He was studying broadcast and film at the time and couldn't see where the degree was going. Video was just starting to move onto the internet — this is back when Zappos was putting shoe videos on product pages — so he asked the guy whether his knife site had any video on it. It didn't. Ben started making YouTube videos about knives instead.

What happened next is what he calls two degrees of learning. You learn YouTube, then realize YouTube is a piece of marketing, so you learn marketing. Then you wonder what's beyond that. Own the marketing department, then finance and accounting, then ops — and eventually you're looking at a business you own outright.

He and his wife started Knafs in 2018 as a side hustle, ran it that way for four years while having kids, and took it full time in 2022. Today it's ten employees, roughly half direct-to-consumer, most product launches happening on Kickstarter, and seventy dealers worldwide with the biggest in the Netherlands. He's not a knife maker, and he'll correct you if you call him one. He's a marketing guy and a storyteller who happens to own a CNC shop with three mills.

The name came from a hashtag nobody had claimed — "knifes" the way it sounds in the American South. Five letters, twelve dollars, 2018. That doesn't happen anymore.

Ben's answer for what he credits his success to is two words: failures and networking. His superpower, by his own account, is connecting ideas — knowing a guy in Boise who knows how to do one thing and a guy with the right machine, and seeing how they fit together. It's the same skill that builds a newscast rundown, which is what he studied.

Also in this one: why there's a glut of pocket knives and what actually makes one matter, five guys from North Carolina who called ahead for a short tour and stayed two hours, live-selling on Whatnot where he signs knives on camera, the roll of toilet paper that sold for a hundred and eight dollars, why he puts space cats on his products when the rest of the industry goes tactical, and the rising-tide mentality he brings to introductions: invite me to your pool when you're all billionaires.