Randall Made Knives

Randall Made Knives has operated from the same site on South Orange Blossom Trail in Orlando since the business grew out of Walter D. "Bo" Randall Jr.'s hobby in the late 1930s. Today his son and grandson run the shop with a staff of about twenty, producing roughly 8,000 knives a year across a catalogue that spans Bowies, military fighting knives, hunting and skinning blades, saltwater models, and stilettos, each finished with a hand-cut leather sheath.

The workshop is a working factory, not a boutique storefront: visitors can tour the shop and showroom Monday through Thursday, and Randall also operates an adjoining museum, open the same days, that holds more than 7,000 knives and other edged pieces documenting the company's own history and the wider trade. It is a rare case of a mid-century American cutlery house that never left its original address or its founding family.

Ownership carries real friction by design. Randall caps orders at one knife per household every three months and quotes waits of roughly seven years for a custom piece, a backlog that has held for decades and is treated by the shop as evidence of standing demand rather than a problem to solve. Designs are still drawn from what the company describes as decades of customer-submitted patterns layered onto Bo Randall's own research, so the current catalogue reads as an accumulated record of the shop's whole working life rather than a fixed product line.