The End of an Era and Why Fixed Blade Manufacturing is Hard

On March 20, 2026 Bark River closed its doors. Here is my article from Gear Junkie covering their closure. It was an ignominious end to the brand. Here is a Reddit post with the Facebook post from Mike Stewart detailing what happened. The TLDR is that Bark River bought Chinese knife blanks, modified their shape, removed the country of origin markings, and labeled them as 154CM steel. This caused a…