Staying Sharp

Looking Back on 30 Years of Success with SOG Specialty Knives Founder Spencer Frazer.

- Rob Curtis

SOG Specialty Knives was born from a single cell. Over the past 30 years, it’s evolved into a successful company that’s grown steadily since its founder, Spencer Frazer, designed its first product, a hardworking reproduction of the Vietnam War-era SOG Bowie knife back in the 80's.

SOG isn’t a traditional knife company. Frazer, and the company he started, has always been a designer, not a manufacturer. He graduated from UCLA with degrees in math and science, then spent years working in the design and R&D fields. His first taste of entrepreneurship was starting a company with a friend making high-tech speakers. He left that enterprise to work on stealth projects behind the top-secret curtain at aerospace contractor Northrop.

Frazer would later find himself in the aisle of a Southern California gun show, indulging his curiosity in Vietnam War-era tiger stripe camo patterns, when he’d come across a knife that would captivate him. The Joint Services Special Operations unit or the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group was a shadowy cousin of our nation’s special operations forces. It was a secret multi-service unit set up to run covert military operations before and during the Vietnam War.

The unit commissioned its own unique knife for its members’ use in the punishing Southeast Asian jungle environment. The SOG Bowie, as it was called, encapsulated the mystery and wonder Frazer came to hold for the unit.

This knife ignited his mixture of passion for design, knife-making, and history. The resulting combustion drove Frazer to commission his own take on the SOG Bowie, the SOG S1 Bowie, propelling the growth of a company that would ultimately help usher in a period of innovation in knife-making across the industry.