https://blademag.com/knife-history/history-of-the-blade-show-it-all-started-with-two-names
The BLADE Show moved to the Holiday Inn and Convention Center in Knoxville in 1984, where it hosted over 30 booths and almost 500 tables. This partial shot of the show hall is from the late 1980s.
It was Bruce and Jim who organized the first BLADE Show—advertised early on as The Blade Magazine 1982 Knife Show—at the Drawbridge Motor Inn in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. (At the time, Jim and Bruce co-owned both the show and BLADE® Magazine.) Just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio, the event drew 7,000 attendees, by the standards of the day a huge amount of folks for one knife show. Even now, other than the BLADE Show, few if any knife shows attract that many people.
Remember, this was all done long before there was an internet and social media to generate pre-show interest. Pre-show advertising was basically all print—mostly in BLADE—and by word of mouth. Add the fact that the knife industry itself was a shadow of what it is today in terms of numbers of factory knife companies, custom knifemakers and, most importantly, knife enthusiasts, and attracting 7,000 attendees is even more remarkable.
Bruce and Jim, the latter founder of Parker Cutlery, were nothing if not visionary marketers of knives and venues in which to market them. They knew that to make the BLADE Show really stand out, they would have to make it the focal point of all things knives. To do this, they had to establish the event as the be-all/end-all knife show.
One of the things that set the BLADE Show apart even back then was it gathered all segments of the cutlery industry—factory, handmade, antique, knife collections, etc.—all under one roof. While the concept had been tried before, it had never continued in an annual fashion the way the BLADE Show was about to do it under the direction of Jim and Bruce.
Another way to make the show unique was to establish awards that would be the factory knife industry’s equivalent of the movie industry’s Oscars. The awards would be the standard to which all factory knives and knife companies would aspire. The BLADE Magazine Knife-The-Year® Awards were the result, and they remain the most coveted factory knife honors to this day.
Bruce and Jim had the Knife-Of-The-Year concept covered, but what about a way for the show to memorialize its pioneers, the movers and shakers that made the knife industry the dynamic entity that it had been and would become even more so? The solution: the BLADE Magazine Cutlery Hall Of Fame®, with the latest members enshrined each year at the BLADE Show. Created for the 1983 event, it remains the industry standard to this day.
The BLADE Show moved to the Holiday Inn and Convention Center in Knoxville in 1984, where it hosted over 30 booths and almost 500 tables. This partial shot of the show hall is from the late 1980s.
It was Bruce and Jim who organized the first BLADE Show—advertised early on as The Blade Magazine 1982 Knife Show—at the Drawbridge Motor Inn in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. (At the time, Jim and Bruce co-owned both the show and BLADE® Magazine.) Just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio, the event drew 7,000 attendees, by the standards of the day a huge amount of folks for one knife show. Even now, other than the BLADE Show, few if any knife shows attract that many people.
Remember, this was all done long before there was an internet and social media to generate pre-show interest. Pre-show advertising was basically all print—mostly in BLADE—and by word of mouth. Add the fact that the knife industry itself was a shadow of what it is today in terms of numbers of factory knife companies, custom knifemakers and, most importantly, knife enthusiasts, and attracting 7,000 attendees is even more remarkable.
Bruce and Jim, the latter founder of Parker Cutlery, were nothing if not visionary marketers of knives and venues in which to market them. They knew that to make the BLADE Show really stand out, they would have to make it the focal point of all things knives. To do this, they had to establish the event as the be-all/end-all knife show.
One of the things that set the BLADE Show apart even back then was it gathered all segments of the cutlery industry—factory, handmade, antique, knife collections, etc.—all under one roof. While the concept had been tried before, it had never continued in an annual fashion the way the BLADE Show was about to do it under the direction of Jim and Bruce.
Another way to make the show unique was to establish awards that would be the factory knife industry’s equivalent of the movie industry’s Oscars. The awards would be the standard to which all factory knives and knife companies would aspire. The BLADE Magazine Knife-The-Year® Awards were the result, and they remain the most coveted factory knife honors to this day.
Bruce and Jim had the Knife-Of-The-Year concept covered, but what about a way for the show to memorialize its pioneers, the movers and shakers that made the knife industry the dynamic entity that it had been and would become even more so? The solution: the BLADE Magazine Cutlery Hall Of Fame®, with the latest members enshrined each year at the BLADE Show. Created for the 1983 event, it remains the industry standard to this day.
