LionSteel was founded in 1969 by Gino Pauletta in Maniago, a town in northeastern Italy whose knife-making tradition dates back more than a thousand years. Pauletta had spent the previous twelve years as a cutler and started his own company with a hundred-piece tin-opener order for a regional manufacturer. The breakthrough came a decade later: on a trip to Milan in 1978, he saw an American pocket knife in a gift shop window with an inlaid handle and resolved to make something better. The knife he developed — combining olive wood and brass — became his bestseller and put the company on the map. Today LionSteel is run by his three sons, Daniele, Gianni, and Massimo, who joined the workshop at the turn of the century and introduced CNC machining, water-jet cutting, and laser cutting alongside the bench inspection their father insisted on. The firm has won Blade Show's Overall Knife of the Year three times — in 2014, 2015, and 2016 — and remains entirely family-owned and run out of the same workshop in Maniago.