Berti Cutlery: nothing but the best

It’s high time to introduce Mr Andrea Berti, the man behind the huge success of Berti Cutlery, the Italian company that has been delighting the world with its premium quality knives for more than a century.

Andrea’s great grandfather, David, founded the company in 1895 in Scarperia, the sacred land of Italian knives. He was a talented knife maker and knew very well that there was only one way to beat his copious, well established competitors: make better cutlery.

He adopted a no-compromise strategy, selecting first-rate materials and the best fellow artisans in the region. Furthermore he set a rule that at the time did not seem so important but that was to be decisive for the future of his workshop: all his knives must be handmade using traditional methods.

His son did not see a good reason why he should change the good principles set by the founder, but hard times were behind the corner. After WWII the machine made cutlery, just like any other machine made tool, swept away most of the knife making workshops in Scarperia.

Only a few companies survived, undergoing fundamental changes and a robust “loss of weight”. How did they resist the pressure of low cost, machine made products? Staying faithful to the production techniques that the artisans of Scarperia had been using and fine tuning for more than 600 hundred year. An exercise of pure craftsmanship that has learnt over time to process raw materials in a way no machine can emulate.

Berti Cutlery - generation after generation - Credits Coltellerie BertiAndrea Berti started managing the company in the late Eighties with a clear project in mind: make the most of his ancestors skills and of Scarperia traditional knife making methods and concentrate on the production of a limited number of completely hand crafted knives.

His first step was … backwards! He gave up on the division of labor, training his artisans to create a knife from start to finish. He sold the (few) machines used by his predecessors and re-introduced traditional methods from the tradition of Scarperia. His first collections were ready in 1995, one hundred years after David Berti opened his workshop.

The rest of the story is under well known. Berti’s kitchen knives are the pride of professional cooks and home cooks as well: contemporary, perfect cutting tools made by the skilled hands of a handful of artisans trained by a 600-year old tradition.

By Tiziana Manzetti

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