The Factory
2660 W. Quail Ave. Phoenix, AZ
We are a small family-owned enterprise located in Phoenix, Arizona. Our knives are made at our facility on the northern edge of the metropolitan Phoenix area. At any given time, we employ approximately 50 local Arizonans and are proud to have these wonderful countrymen as part of our knife family. We make fixed and folding sporting and gentleman-style pocketknives for men and women within the Every Day Carry (EDC) civilian consumer market and a Legion of collector lunatics we call friends. We also serve military, law enforcement, tactical details and adventurers alike, as they boldly make the world a better place. Our legacy Our legacy knives can be made with more custom bespoke options than any other maker on Earth and serve the highest-end everyday knife carriers and collectors.
We are staunchly and very intelligently pro-American. We acknowledge the worst impulses of our nation and, in total, still realize it’s the greatest system for individual self-determinism the world has yet seen. To that end, we make our knives here in the United States in every way possible. While some occasional screws or small hardware parts are globally sourced from good global neighbors, every knife, handle, spring, frame, and backstrap is made in our facility by our craftsmen in Phoenix, Arizona.
The backbone of a knife is, well… steel. We get our steel from Niagara Specialty Metals in Upstate New York. Niagara processes and distributes CPM steels and is an ESOP employee-owned company. They represent the very best in product innovation for cutlery, and their support throughout our company’s history has been invaluable. Your purchases of Medford Knives and associated brands support not only our family of Americans but also the Americans employed by every supplier and cooperating partner we use to bring our creations to you.
Meet Greg Medford
The founder, owner and lead designer is Greg Medford. Greg is a father, commercial pilot, graduate of Gettysburg College, multi-style black-belt martial artist, USMC-0311combat veteran, artist, musician, designer, self-made engineer, serial entrepreneur and staunchly American. Greg does everything with a zeal and intensity that’s hard to imagine.
He’s a hard critic of incompetence and does not suffer fools kindly, at either the national level or in person. As a leader in the industry, he rails on China and urges Americanism at every opportunity. He has always insisted on transparency and openness at every turn and helps competitors and friends constantly with manufacturing advice and strategy to keep the work and talent in America.
When not working you can find Greg diving into any one of his hobbies, maybe on a motorcycle of nearly any kind, horseback, upside down in a Warbird, playing guitar or piano and singing, or out Country Dancing and spending time with his amazing children Jack and Roxanne.
Although Greg started the company on his own, his former wife and current business partner, Amy Medford joined the team in 2013. Their business partnership survived the end of their 23 year marriage and Amy serves as part owner and invaluable part of the MKT family. Amy brings her work ethic and attention to detail to the daily operation. She is in charge of Order Fulfillment Coordination, B2B receivables and relations as well as custom order coordinator.
American Made
A slogan for some and a sales point for others. For us it is a way of life and not taken lightly. We have made waves directing an assault on our industry and others whose modern MBA leadership has sacrificed ethics in search of the almighty dollar. Let’s make a buck but let’s do it in a way that is congruent with our morals, ethics and laws we have agreed on as a society. We all agree on clean water, air, workers rights, the 40-hr work week, overtime pay, safety protocols and standards and the myriad of Federal, State and Municipal regulations and subsequent costs for goods made in the USA.
We have no bone to pick with most of these constraints but we ask our Countrymen again and again to employ the same morals in purchasing as they do in regulating their fellow countrymen’s industries. It is dishonest to have these high right-minded expectations from one’s own country then expect prices competitive with nations who practice unbridled capitalist tendencies and near slave labor for its work force.
We ask you all to resist the urge to be high minded and low-buying but rather be high minded and buy less but of only the best. It’s an ironic moral crime we as Americans are all guilty of when we preach and vote for the environment and humanity then shop at big-box retailors who are basically portals to slave labor, environmental blight and ultimately undermine that which we all hold most sacred.
To this end we are lead by Greg who is outspoken, bold, radical, sarcastic, inappropriate, hilarious, intense, divisive, hostile, archaic, brash and sometimes wrong. Why would we let him lead? Because he has the courage to say what we all think at one point of another… Greg is the honest voice in a crowd of sheep who will point right at the establishment or anyone else and say:
“Those are not new clothes sir…you are in fact naked…stop lying”
And for that we occasionally wince but mostly quietly smile in support of untarnished truth and the cost we happily bear as a team from speaking it.
“The only things necessary for evil to transpire is for good men to sit idly by and do nothing…”