Ben Petersen-Designed WE Banter
By H. Clay Aalders
Most people assume, (as did I), that the new WE Knife Banter was named for “Knife Banter”. This was the BladeHQ YouTube series co-founded by the knife’s designer Ben Petersen, in which he starred from 2016-2018. During this time, he amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and as a result there has been quite a buzz about his debut design release in online circles.
It turns out the name has a deeper meaning, as the first initials of Ben’s growing family (and how they signed their Christmas cards) went from B-A-N-T to B-A-N-T-R to finally B-A-N-T-E-R quite recently with the birth of their 4th child.
I first met Ben Petersen before the Knife Banter days, when he was a digital marketing specialist at CRKT, tasked with promoting the brand to various online outlets such as blogs and YouTube channels. To this day, he remains the gold-standard brand representative against which I judge all others across a multitude of companies. He was always engaged, friendly, and responsive, no matter what our interaction. A legion of online knife personalities all will have their own version of this same story.
This article appeared in the August 2020 issue of Knife Magazine. Click the blue box below to read the whole thing:
