Wilko Verboom was captivated by tools and blades long before he could properly wield either. Growing up in Woerden, in the Netherlands, he collected knives as a child, endlessly curious about how they were made. A documentary on Japanese bladesmiths, caught by chance, sealed his course. At thirteen, he built a coal forge from a length of pipe, borrowed a stick welder from his uncle, and welded his first seam without eye protection, an error that cost him a week of blurred vision but not his resolve. Powered by his mother’s hairdryer (which did not survive the experiment), this first forge, and a thick steel plate pressed into service as his anvil, were the jumping-off point. His mother was not amused by the mess made. Wilko’s fascination, unlike the hairdryer, held.

Around the same time, he began teaching himself to sharpen, first on classmates’ chisels during a secondary-school class that earned him sole custody of the school’s bench grinder, then on a grinder of his own, which he used to shape a katana finished entirely with files and sandpaper. What started as a childhood obsession has grown into more than fifteen years of forging and sharpening. At nineteen, he moved into his own workshop, the same one he still uses today.

Wilko studied industrial product design and went on to work as a mechanical engineer, designing machines for the food industry, training that still shapes how he works. He is unusually visual in how he thinks about a blade, picturing its geometry and how every angle and curve will behave under a chef’s hand. He has found that a tenth of a millimeter in the right place, the depth or placement of a convex grind, can be the difference between a good knife and a great one. But even with an engineering career underway, he realized his real passion was working with his hands, and during a particularly difficult period in his life, it was the workshop that gave him steadiness. Focusing on the steel, the fire, and the process of creation became something close to meditation, a place where the noise of the outside world faded and he could simply focus on what was in front of him.

Working with his hands gave him back a sense of purpose, and it was his fiancée, Daniëlle, who urged him to take the leap and make it his full-time work. Out of that encouragement and support, Grateful Knives was born, a brand built on the belief that making something meaningful can change a life. At home, Daniëlle and their rescue dog, Kiran, remain two of his steadiest sources of inspiration, present in the quieter hours between forging sessions. Every knife Wilko makes today is forged and finished entirely by hand, with the patience and respect for material that his own path demanded of him. As a cook himself, he builds kitchen knives around the intersection of performance, craftsmanship, and the simple joy of everyday use.

Performance comes first in Wilko’s work, with visual character and finish following close behind. His high-end pieces, often crafted with damascus of 60,000 layers or more, carry finishes fine enough that their performance only improves as a natural patina, known in these circles as a 'starry night' finish, has had the chance to form. Alongside that full custom work, Wilko has put his engineering background to a different kind of problem: designing a Signature Collection that holds onto nearly all of that same cutting performance, at a more accessible price and lead time. It’s a way into his work rather than a lesser version of it, and the same instinct that drew him to engineering in the first place, finding the most efficient path to the best possible result. His customers, it is no surprise, return again and again.

By his own description, Wilko is something of an extraverted introvert, gentle and kind, with more depth than first meets the eye, and he sees the same quality in his knives: they don’t announce themselves loudly, yet always reward a closer look. A perfectionist who sometimes struggles to know when a custom blade is finished, Wilko holds himself to standards that leave little room for anything less than his best. His customers, he believes, aren’t just buying a knife, they’re taking part in his journey at a specific moment in time, and holding onto a future heirloom because of it.

Eatingtools founder Abe spent time with Wilko recently in Austria, time enough to recognize a kindred obsession: the same insistence on pushing a craft past where it’s comfortable to stop. It’s that shared instinct, as much as the knives themselves, that brought Wilko’s work into the Eatingtools collection.