I'm Kazim

I'm from a small town in the Caucasus, in southern Russia. I finished university in Moscow in 2008 and started working as a software engineer. In 2019 my family and I moved to Berlin. Since April 2026 I work on Kesgen Blades full-time, designing folding knives with an obsession for precision, mechanics, and how a knife feels in the hand.

The name

Kesgen [ˈkɛsɡɛn] means “cutting” — as an adjective — in my native language. It defines the purpose of every knife since the Stone Age.

It started in a sandbox

My first knife memory: I'm three years old. My father had a small but diverse collection — automatics, folders, fixed blades, even a small sword. One day he came home from work and found the whole thing dumped in a pile of sand out by the road, where anyone passing could've taken them.

That was me. Been hooked ever since.

Making, not just carrying

Making knives came much later. In 2024 I made a small letter opener out of a piece of aluminum for my daughter. Then I ordered steel from Amazon and built my first fixed blade. I'm the kind of person who likes to make things harder than they need to be, so naturally the next thing I tried was a folding knife with a liner lock — and that's when it clicked. The process took all of my attention, and I fell for it.

Why the RailLock

While I was working on that liner lock folder, the lock kept slipping. I managed to improve it, but I still couldn't trust the knife — and that bothered me. The frustration sent me down a rabbit hole of locking mechanisms: Shark-Lock, Ball Bearing Lock, RAM-LOK and many others. It was clear that if I wanted something genuinely reliable, it had to be in that class, so I started designing my own lock that I could use in my own knives.

Software engineering taught me to care about the small details. I build knives the same way.

— Kazim, Berlin. Follow the work on Instagram, or see the RailLock.