The men I trained under had an unusual habit. Whenever an apprentice finished their first worthy blade, they were made to forge a second one straight after it — not to sell, not to keep, but to give to someone who had never owned a proper knife. "A blade that is only yours stops teaching you anything," my uncle used to say. "Hand half of what you make to somebody else, or you'll forget why you started."

I've tried to keep that habit alive in my own workshop, even now that it's just me and a small team shipping knives out of a shop you'll never see. It's part of why, when it came time to run a real offer instead of a one-off discount, I didn't want to just knock a percentage off the price. I wanted to build the habit into the offer itself.

So: buy one Akito knife, and a second one — same steel, same hand-finishing, same inspection — goes in the box with it, free. Keep both. Give one away. Split it with a roommate. I genuinely don't mind which; I just want more of these blades doing the thing they were forged to do, in the hands of someone who needed a better knife and didn't know it yet.

If you've been meaning to replace that one dull knife everyone in your kitchen avoids — or get someone else off theirs — this is the easiest way I know to make that happen twice over.

With gratitude,
Akito