The Knifemaker Who Learned from YouTube: A Conversation with Tomer Botner

Growing Up with Food in Tel Aviv

Tyler: Tell me who you are and what you make.

Tomer: Okay. So I was born Tel Aviv. What is that, 44 years ago? But basically the short answer is that I worked in restaurants for quite a long time and always been really into food. Comes from a family of people, just like to eat very like a classic French, like francophile. Like a French loving family. And I ended up studying industrial design and my final project was a kitchen knife that I was drawn to from these two aspects.

So mainly from the part of using it as a tool for cooking, but also the challenge of designing a tool that's existed for 2 million years and try to find something new that you can do. That was a big challenge.

How a Video Changed Everything

Tyler: Tell me about your entry point to knife making. Is there somebody that taught you the craft? Did you do any sort of formal apprenticeships or did you have a mentor?

Tomer: I think I am one of the first of the kind of new breed of craftsmen who basically had YouTube as a mentor. Like, I didn't have anyone around me that could teach me and there was no history or knowledge in my country. There was nothing to draw on and even materials were hard to source. But the thing that ignited this in me was a little video I saw of a guy called Joel Bukiewicz who had a knife shop in Brooklyn.

And the video was called Made by Hand. And I ended up tattooing handmade on my hand. And it was about him and how he makes his knives. And that was a big, big inspiration of trying to make my take of it basically. And I just flew to Brooklyn, I knocked on Joel's door and we ended up hanging out for a few hours. And you know, a couple years later I had my wedding in his shop.

So Joel is definitely the guy that I was idolizing when I started this. I was lucky enough to work at his workshop a little bit and learn from him. And I've also learned a lot from other makers. And I did like, you know, one week stages here and there.

Failing Your Way to Success

Tomer: A lot of things is just like struggling with this. You know, you pick up, you open Instagram, you text a guy like a friend, someone you know through Instagram, and they help you out with a question.

Like you reach out the person that you think know this aspect of the job better and it's a very nice community and everybody helps each other out a lot. And the biggest thing about, I mean, the biggest thing with this is like, learn by trying. So fail, fail, fail, fail. Eventually you figure it out.

Making Business Decisions in the Workshop

Tyler: How do you decide when to respect traditional forms or innovate and push into a new direction with the design?

Tomer: I think the bigger question for me is like, once it's a business and it's no longer your hobby, there's always the balance of what you put into it against what you get out of it and the value you give to your customers. So there's a lot of things that maybe as a maker would be more interesting for me to do in a more old fashioned, classic way to achieve a result that's like a plus. But monetarily it's like a huge difference between the two.

In the end, I'm focusing my whole focus in what we do is value. Like give the best result for what I charge and improvement, constant improvement, make things better for the customer, but also more efficient internally and do more with less and use less materials, be more efficient in all that we consume.

And in the end, some things we would not let go for the foreseeable future. But you know, you never know. But like some things that we sharpen by hand and we grind the final geometries of our blade done by hand and all the blade shaping the handle shaping. But it's pretty useless to cut a shape of a blade out with a saw when you could do it with a laser machine or cut all those hundreds of thousands of discs that we cut a year any other way than with the CNCs that we use.

Like the stupid things, things that anyone can eventually do we have machines do. We have people who develop skills for the things that you need a human for.

Why Florentine Knives Look Different

Tyler: Have you ever faced resistance when challenging expectations of what a knife should look or feel like?

The 55.6-Degree Angle and Other Small Obsessions

Tyler: Have you modified or designed a tool that really suits your style?

Tomer: Hard to say if we designed any tools. We do a lot of little jigs to help us get things right. Like for instance, our bolsters have this angle that's specific. It's like 55.6 degrees. Just because we think it looks nicer. And so we CNC a little cassette to put the raw material in. And then we adjust the grinder angle according to the tool that we built. And then we just go basically a little bit left and right and we got the angle perfect.

We don't have to do everything by eye, and more efficiently, the main things we do is use these little jigs. And sometimes we buy more machines. Usually when you become more professional, you try and get specific machines to specific jobs. Like a small wheel attachment grinder that does only this little part of the knife. And then you have one grinder for this one for that. And this one has a hard back. This one has a soft backing. This one has slack backing.

So instead of changing things, you just move between machines.

Rituals and Practices

Tyler: Do you have any rituals or practices that help you get into the rhythm of making?

Tomer: I find it really hard to break in and out and for me it's hard because I'm here and usually someone needs something for me. I don't need much. I just need to be alone basically. And usually I put on a podcast or a book on my earphones and I just get in the zone. I mean it doesn't, I don't have anything. It's very easy to break out of it for me. But if I'm uninterrupted, I get into it pretty easily.

What Knives Should Do

Tyler: What do you hope people feel when they use one of your knives?

Tomer: I hope that they just can't wait to get in the kitchen and cook. Like, that's what I mean. I hope my knives are just a catalyst for cooking for a family, feeding someone.

Living Traditions

Tyler: How do you define a living tradition in your craft? And how do you want to pass that on, whether it's to future generations of makers or whoever it may be?

Tomer: I definitely hope that we can. This is a hard job. It looks really sexy from the outside. But when you get to it, when you have to do it day in, day out, it's a very monotonous job, and it requires a very specific mentality to do it, which is one that you need a person that wants to be perfect all the time and wants to get better in very small increments. Not in leaps. You know, and it's not easy to find these days.

And I think it will become harder and harder to find because of everything around us being so fast and easy in a way. And I mean I, who knows what the future will bring. But maybe it will be the opposite because I don't know, AI would do everything for us. So we can just do our hobbies.

But I hope that we can keep these things that cannot be explained. Like many, many of the things that we do here. I really can teach to a certain level. But then comes a point where you have to make 10,000 of them to understand it. And I hope we get the chance to have people here for years and years and then teach to a new generation. You know, if my kids take over, I'll be more than happy to. But you know, it's not something I'm counting on or planning for. But we will definitely, we are mindful and try to preserve the things that we value in this and the tools that we make.

Once you do something and you understand the difference, once you improve something in even the slightest way, it's really hard to give it up and go back to something that's not as good. So a lot of it depends on the people you have working with you and for you. And we just, hopefully we'll keep being lucky with the people that work with us.

Small Improvements Add Up

Throughout our conversation, one theme emerges repeatedly: the commitment to getting better, even in small ways. Whether it's finding that perfect 55.6-degree angle for the bolster, creating jigs that ensure consistency, or deciding which processes benefit from human touch and which should be automated, every decision at Florentine comes back to the same question: how can we provide better value to the customer?

"My whole focus in what we do is value," Tomer explains. "Give the best result for what I charge and improvement, constant improvement. Make things better for the customer, but also more efficient internally. Do more with less, use less materials, be more efficient in all that we consume."

This mindset, part craftsman, part designer, part entrepreneur, makes Florentine stand out in the world of artisan knife making. Tomer isn't trying to recreate the past or prove that old ways are always best. Instead, he's asking which aspects of traditional craft are truly irreplaceable, and which can be improved through modern methods.

In other words: a living tradition.