Greg Medford

Greg Medford is a native Arizonan and a hard-core American patriot. Before there was a knife company, there was a rifleman. Greg served in the United States Marine Corps as an 0311, with 1st Bn 25th Marines Alpha Co. — “New England’s Own” — and deployed as an augmentation force with the 5th Marines for Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

That seven-month deployment left an indelible mark, and a memory of exactly what a knife is asked to do when it actually matters. It’s a lesson no classroom teaches, and it’s the yardstick Greg has measured every design against ever since.

After his military service and graduating from Gettysburg College, Greg came back West to the Arizona he was born in, to marry and raise a family. For about a decade he was a regional leader in the Warbird movement, flying airshows in radial-engine warbirds he personally restored and maintained.

The attention to detail, practicality, elegance, simplicity, and ultimate reliability required to survive the dangerous world of stunt flying carries directly into every detail of a Medford knife. Every line, arch, screw, and mechanism is scrutinized with the same rigor he spent years applying to building and restoring military aircraft.

The instinct for craft and service runs back further than any knife. Greg’s parents ran a plumbing business out of the house — the phone got answered at any hour of the night, because a family with a flooded house at 10:30pm was the entire point of the business. His grandparents ran the bigger operation: a trucking company his Greek grandfather, Christy Nekitopoulos, built, still family-owned and operating nearly 100 years later. His other grandfather, Ferris Medford, was a West Texas horseman who hand-tooled fine leather goods for his friends in law enforcement — Yankee ingenuity on one side of the family, Western self-reliance on the other.

The lesson came at Greg from both sides and never left: the customer is the boss, the customer is the lifeblood, and you pick up the phone. It’s why the way MKT treats its customers hasn’t changed since day one.

Knife making is also a passion and a business of teaching — without more makers, there is no knife-future. When Greg isn’t working the craft with the team, he’s being a dad, with man-skills to teach and advice to give. Off the clock you’ll find him out in the wilds on horseback, on the backroads of the Great American West in his Power Wagon, or doing chores on a ranch in Utah. Every adventure — sharks head-butting the boat, landing off-field somewhere remote, working the ranch up North — is a place to use a knife, or inspiration for a new one.

Greg loves America but is a hard critic too. Legions of MKTooligans follow his weekly rants and podcast, tuning in for chats from the heart that feature famous, infamous, political, social, and business guests, as well as personal friends.

Greg spent a lifetime using knives and tools in every passion he chased, restoring war-trophy Japanese swords through much of the 1980s and always keeping a blade close. His love for knives came to a head in 2009, when he went looking for one very particular knife, couldn’t find it, and decided to just make it himself.

Sometime around 2010, he walked into an empty 1,200-square-foot space on the edge of metro Phoenix with no knife made yet and no money to speak of — and talked a landlord into leasing him the building on nothing but his word that he’d never stiffed anyone or bounced a check. He maxed out a credit card for a welder, a grinder, and a heat-treat oven, talked a local supplier out of drop sheets of steel, found a water-jet shop to cut blanks for ten dollars apiece, wrapped ten handles in paracord, and put a sticker with his crest and cell number on the door. The first walk-in customer bought four on the spot. All ten sold out in the first week.

Every hobby, every aircraft part, every home-built project and do-it-yourself task he’d ever taken on came to bear, and knifemaking finally gave his creativity somewhere to go. In just a few years he rounded up ex-military and aerospace friends to build knives the uncompromising way, and the Praetorian — the knife that put Medford on the map — was born out of those late nights in the garage.