Brandyn ‘Bud’ Heyser
Brandyn "Bud" Heyser is the freewheeling Kentuckian behind 13 Knives, though these days you're more likely to find him puttering about a forge in Collingwood than anywhere near a horse farm. Bud left his "birth-hole" in Shelbyville in 2014 with an architecture degree he hadn't planned on loving, and rode a home-built motorcycle 12,500km across the United States: no maps, no GPS, mostly rice and questionable bathroom sink wash-ups. A public radio station did the rest: the funniest-sounding people on the internet, he figured, probably lived somewhere worth living so he landed in Melbourne in 2015 without ever having visited.
Knife-making, which ran in the family by way of his father and grandfather, eventually pulled him into a forge on Easey Street. 13 Knives was born in 2017 and has been turning out custom blades (plus the occasional champagne sabre, circus-grade throwing knife or oyster shuckers for a devoted collector) ever since.
Every knife starts as a drawing and ends as something closer to an heirloom: over twenty meticulous steps, sometimes 120 hours, no detail too small to obsess over — and one Band-Aid hidden in every box, because Bud knows exactly what his customers need.
He's happy to take on most special requests. Just don't ask him when his birthday falls. He genuinely doesn't know, and he's totally fine with that.