To understand why hand sharpening matters so much, Corey tells a story that starts about 8,000 miles from Jackson Hole.

In the early years of New West KnifeWorks, as the company grew from handmade blades to a real manufacturing operation, Corey tried to find a production partner in the United States. He couldn't. So he went to Japan — specifically to Seki, a city with 800 years of blade-making history. It was the sword-making center of Japan before it became the knife-making center of Japan, and the Fukamoto family — the first to transition from samurai swords to kitchen knives — was among the makers Corey worked with.

What he found in Seki was a deeply specialized, distributed craft economy. Different experts handled different parts of the knife: one shop ground the blade, another polished it, another made the handle, another handled heat treatment. Makers would literally run their parts around town in colored milk cartons, delivering work between subcontractors — some operating out of sheds behind their homes.

It was hyper-specialized, time-honored, and remarkably effective.

But there was one thing nobody outsourced.

"The only thing that they did in-house was sharpen the knives," Corey says. "Because they're like — this is the hardest thing, but our whole reputation depends on the fact that these things are sharp when people first pick them up."

Eight hundred years of collective knowledge, and the masters of Seki still kept sharpening under their own roof. Not because they were precious about it — because it was simply too important to trust to anyone else.