Shop Kershaw
Kershaw is the fourth deepest brand in our warehouse. There are 235 Kershaw SKUs on the shelf in Woodlawn, Virginia right now, spread across knives, gear, fishing and a single care item, and every one of them is picked and packed by us. Nothing on this page is dropshipped from somebody else's building.
What makes Kershaw worth a page of its own is the range. The same brand that sells you a $5.99 fixed blade also sells a $182.25 folder built in Oregon out of Sandvik 14C28N. Very few knife companies cover that much ground, and it means "a Kershaw" tells you almost nothing until you know which shelf it came off. This page sorts that out.
Kershaw was founded in 1974 by Pete Kershaw in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and started out making hunting knives. It is now a brand of Kai USA Ltd., part of the family-owned Kai Group based in Seki City, Japan. Kai celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2008 and is run by third-generation president Koji Endo, so the parent company has been producing bladed tools in Japan for more than a century.
The company's manufacturing base is a 55,000 square foot facility in Tualatin, Oregon. That plant is why the phrase "Made in USA" shows up on the premium end of this catalog and not the budget end. Kershaw builds its higher-end folders in Oregon and sources its value lines from overseas, and the product specs on our pages say which is which rather than leaving you to guess.
Here is the real breakdown of those 235 SKUs, by the categories the store actually uses:
The Closeouts number is worth pausing on. Roughly a third of the Kershaw items in the building are sitting in clearance at any given time, and that bin is where the discontinued Damascus and CPM-154 Leeks end up.
Read the spec line on any Kershaw product page here and you will usually land on one of five steels. Sorted by how often they appear across the live catalog:
If you want to compare these against what other brands in the building run, the CIVIVI knife range is the closest comparison at similar money.
Kershaw's spread is the widest of any brand we carry, so it helps to think in bands rather than in models.
Kershaw covers its knives with a Limited Lifetime Warranty against defects in materials and construction, for the life of the product, to the original owner. It is non-transferable, so it follows the person who bought the knife rather than the knife itself.
What it does not cover is the part people get wrong. Normal wear, rust, improper use or maintenance, accidents, loss and theft are all excluded. A blade you let sit wet in a tackle box until it pitted is not a warranty claim, and neither is one you pried a paint can open with. Defects in how the knife was built are. Registering nothing and keeping your receipt is the practical version of this advice.
Three questions get most people to the right shelf.
Is this a knife you will lose? If it lives in a truck door or a tackle box, buy in the sub-$40 band and do not feel bad about it. The 8Cr13MoV models exist for exactly this.
Do you sharpen? If the answer is no, stay away from D2 and buy the softer stainless models, which come back with a few passes on almost anything. If the answer is yes, D2 and MagnaCut reward you with much longer intervals between touch-ups.
Does it need to survive being wet? For saltwater and cleaning tables, look at the fillet knives, or at MagnaCut, which handles moisture better than anything else Kershaw builds. D2 is the one to avoid in that job.
Still deciding between brands? Buck covers similar ground with a different warranty philosophy, and Gerber is deeper on multi-tools.
