The brand was founded in 1939 when Joseph Gerber, the owner of a printing company and advertising agency, partnered with knifemaker David Murphy to create custom kitchen carving knives for his clients. Abercrombie and Fitch, which was a popular New York-based outfitter at the time, got ahold of a set of those blades and wanted more. They reached out to Joseph Gerber about making sets of knives for the store, and Gerber Legendary Blades, the company we now know as Gerber Gear (and colloquially shortened to just Gerber), was born.
Gerber was a small family operation for decades, handed down first from father to son, then from brother to brother. In the beginning, Gerber focused on carving knives, using recycled metals. They used old aluminum heads and pistons from auto repair shops for the handles and ground hacksaw blades into shape for blades. The knives were given mythological names. Balmung, a 14.25-inch carving knife, was named after a legendary sword from Norse mythology. The 9.75-inch Curtana cake knife was named after the ceremonial sword used to coronate British knights. Of course, there was an Excalibur, a 17-inch-long carving knife reserved for special occasions. Those knives were as beautiful as they were practical. In fact, Ron, a carving knife with two tines, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Gerber introduced its first hunting knife in 1947, its first fishing knife in the 60s and, by the 70s, the brand was focused primarily on making knives for the outdoors. In the ‘90s, Gerber started making multi-tools, not just for the general public, but for the military. At one point, the pliers-centric MP600 was the military’s No.1 multi-tool. Service members relied on the American-made, 14-feature tool in the toughest situations all over the world, underscoring Gerber’s focus on quality. The tools being produced might have changed, but the purpose of the brand has remained the same.
"Everything starts with solving a consumer problem,” Carrato says. “We spend a lot of time obsessing over potential problems in the outdoors and how we can meet those needs. Everything we design is put through that lens.”