About Us

We are a family-owned and operated knife company that started in 2010 in California. Olamic began with fixed blades and expanded into folders in 2013. To do so we brought along ABS MasterSmith Michael Vagnino and built up a small facility in Visalia, CA where he lives. Our goal at the time was to combine old world handwork we learned from our fixed blades and modern materials to make custom folders.

The Wayfarer Classic was our first such folder, followed by Wayfarer Compact, Rainmaker, and Gambit. These models are handmade, built without the use of CNC. Making knives one at a time is the only way to maintain our “never the same" mantra. There are over ten million possible builds on our custom knives and each one made is unique.

Our fixed blades going back to 2010 have been made in Russia, and that is still the case. We forge our own Damascus steel there in-house, from a proprietary mix of alloys designed as HCVD or High Carbon Vanadium Damascus. You will occasionally see HCVD used on our folders, and for that we use blanks forged in Russia and brought over to California for finishing.

In 2016 we wanted to offer a robust EDC knife and designed the Wayfarer 247. We quickly realized that to make this knife competitive we need to have some parts pre-machined. Areas where precision matters in making the knife function as it should, reliably, and for a long time are done this way. Beyond that we build them by hand, and as you'll see most of our variants/finishes can't be done by machine anyway.