Aurora Knife and Tool

Aurora Knife and Tool is the Reed family—Michael, Melody, and the kiddos. Michael has been a lifelong knife enthusiast but got involved in the community in 2019 under the name “Misheard Knife Reviews,” sharing tongue-in-cheek content on Instagram and YouTube. After attending Blade Show that year and meeting many online friends in person, Michael and Melody were hooked.

Though Michael’s background is in pastoring, education, and music, he’s always been a hands-on tinkerer drawn to the art forms he loves. He began designing and making fixed blades for friends and family in 2018, then entered a folding knife design competition in 2020. The design didn’t place, but the interest it generated sparked a bigger idea.

With encouragement from friends and family, Aurora Knife and Tool launched in early 2021. The first products reflected that same tongue-in-cheek spirit from the Misheard Knife Reviews days, with shirts, patches, and coins that sat at the intersection of art, pop culture, and EDC.

The company’s first folding knife came about through a serendipitous encounter at SHOT Show 2023. Michael had been working on a concept for a pivot-based button lock but had yet to produce a working prototype. At the show, he happened to meet representatives from Scikio, a long-established OEM based in Yangjiang, China. Scikio, as it turned out, was about to introduce their own pivot-based button lock and was looking for brand partners.

Michael began designing a new knife around Scikio’s mechanism, dubbing mechanism the “Roundhouse Lock” since there wasn’t an English name for it at the time. That knife design became Truffles—a beefy, tanto-style behemoth whose name started off as a joke but eventually stuck.

Truffles launched via Kickstarter in August 2023 and was delivered to backers in May 2024. AKT introduced Dark Truffles (a black stonewashed version) in August 2024, and successfully funded their latest knife, HiveMind, on Kickstarter in April 2025. All three of AKT’s current offerings feature the Roundhouse Lock, a mechanism known for its solid lockup and fidget friendliness.

AKT has several other designs and projects in the works, but the goal remains what it was from the start—to give back to a community that’s given so much to us. So if we can provide a useful tool, merch that makes you smile, or an encouraging word along the way, we’ll feel like we’ve done what we came to do.