Our Story

Where Every Great Voyage Begins

Every great company starts somewhere no one expects. A garage. A dorm room. A kitchen table.

For Piratech, it was a parents' apartment.

On July 1st, 2023, Damon and Kay left Kizer with nothing but a conviction: there's a better way to build things, and they were going to find it. No office. No salary. No guarantee. Just an apartment that became headquarters, and a question that became an obsession.

What if we built something nobody else dared to?

The Name

Piratech. Pirate + Tech.

Two words that shouldn't belong together. One is rebellion, exploration, the terrifying unknown. The other is precision, engineering, and exacting standards. Put them together, and you get a company crazy enough to do what hasn't been done.

Every pirate ship needs a flag—something that strikes fear. But Damon saw it differently. "People use their own fears to scare others, assuming everyone's afraid of the same thing," he said. "But the real power is putting the thing you fear on the flag. So you conquer it every single day."

That's the Kraken. The monster that haunts every sailor's nightmare. Eight tentacles reaching into uncharted waters. It became the symbol of a ship that sails toward uncertainty on purpose—because that's where discoveries are made.

The Test

The first two months nearly broke them.

No income. No clear direction. Savings are draining by the day. The voice every entrepreneur knows—the one that whispers "What have you done?"—got louder each morning.

And in the middle of that pressure, they made a decision that seemed absurd: replace the traditional screw structure holding knife scales together. With magnets.

Friends doubted it. Family doubted it. Their own engineer doubted it. The small factory they partnered with—the ones with physical knowledge, the ones who should know—doubted it. Even Damon and Kay themselves designed a simpler backup plan, something to sell first, something safe.

Sleepless nights followed. Arguments with the engineer. Watching the bank account shrink.

And somewhere in that struggle, they rediscovered something they had almost forgotten: joy. The joy of tackling problems no one else had solved. The joy of building something genuinely new. It reminded them why they left Kizer in the first place.

To seek different.

Damon made the call: "If it's physically possible, then it's doable. Any problem is an excuse. Either we succeed, or we die trying. Never compromise."

That became the law of the ship.

The Breakthrough

August 2023. The first magnetic-scale prototype emerged. And the impossible thing held. Better than anyone expected.

It wasn't finished. Tolerances needed refining. Sliding had to be eliminated. But there was proof now—the magnets worked.

Damon articulated what would become Piratech's design philosophy: "It's better we solve it before production than customers solve it every time they use it."

Every detail that feels effortless when you use a Piratech product? That's hundreds of hours of obsession deliberately hidden. Exactly as it should be.

After a month of relentless testing and prototyping, the Kráki™ was born.

The Voyage Continues

October 2023. The first batch shipped. The market responded with force. Loans were repaid. The R&D pipeline ignited.

November 2023—just five months after starting in an apartment—Piratech received an invitation to Blade Show Atlanta. The biggest stage in the knife world.

We've returned every year since. Each time, bringing something that shouldn't exist: Crystallized Titanium. Crystallized Copper. Alcantara® stitching. Addressable tension slip-joints. Magnetic inlays.

Never the same thing twice. Because repeating yourself is boring, and the knife community didn't need another brand doing what's already been done. It needed a ship willing to sail into the storm.

The Kraken still flies. The crew still explores. The journey is never over.

Piratech. Seek Different.