Böker Plus Kazy

A front flipper always asks for a bit of trust. You put your thumb on the exposed spine, push down, and if the geometry is right the blade snaps through on its bearings like someone gave it a hand. On the Kazy it is right. That has a lot to do with who drew the thing.

Gabriel Berthélémy, born in 1990, raised in the Ain and in Lyon, today runs the workshop La Forge AGAB in Crest in the Drôme. As a kid he took apart everything he could get his hands on – putting it back together worked out far less often, which drove his father up the wall on a regular basis. He later studied architecture and mostly worked out from it that he wanted to be at the material with his hands. Volunteer bicycle wrenching and welding got him out of Lyon and into the Drôme, where he first made jewellery from found objects. Then came Flo Baroud, his master smith, and finally the coutelier David Lespect, who taught him the liner lock. The lessons turned into a friendship.

Forging, Gabriel says, is intensely sensory: the eye reads the temperature, the sound on the anvil tells you whether the hammer landed right. The forging happens in his workshop in Gigors, mostly damascus, while other blades he works cold from solid stock. What comes out at the end is almost exclusively liner lock folders, every piece a one-off, every step of the work his own. And there is a story in there too: he met Bastards Knives in 2024 at the Strasbourg show, and a year later they built his frame lock in a run of 200 pieces. It was the first time one of his knives carried a name. Octavus, after the number eight in rugby, the position Gabriel used to play.

The Kazy is the Böker Plus translation of that handwriting. The blade is Nitro-V, a stainless nitrogen steel that takes an edge back without any fuss and forgives a fair bit in daily use, here with a two-tone finish. 6,7 cm of blade at 3,2 mm thick, 16,5 cm open, 69 g on the scale: that carries all day without dragging your waistband down. The Coyote Tan G10 scales bring a warm, slightly dusty tone that works with the two-tone blade. It locks up on a liner lock and rides on a deep carry clip that drops the knife almost entirely out of sight in your pocket.

Who is it for? Anyone who wants French custom design in their everyday rotation without joining a waiting list. Otherwise you only get this close to a knife from the Crest workshop by catching the right show at the right moment.