Charles Marlowe
Collaborating designer, RKMP series
Charles Marlowe is the American custom maker whose KMP22 the Shirogorov Brothers Workshop reworked as the RKMP, a joint project that took Knife Collaboration of the Year at Blade Show Atlanta in June 2025, before the first run was released in November 2025, and that has since grown to four models.
Todd Eby, NIIVES
Biography
Marlowe started making knives as a teenager in his father’s woodworking shop. He kept at it part time through high school and college, then in his last semester decided that knives were what he’d do full time, and worked as a custom maker from then on, to designs of his own.
Balisongs are what he’s known for. The rest of his work leans tactical. Benchmade took up a partnership with him and put a Marlowe balisong into production.
The knife the workshop took up was the KMP22, one of his custom models and one that already had a second life. Boker built a production version of it in Solingen, the Boker KMP22, a custom design on a factory line. Sergey Shirogorov reworked the custom. The RKMP keeps the KMP22’s look and changes the build under it, which is the pattern of the workshop’s design collaborations: an outside maker’s existing shape, rebuilt by the workshop under a new name. On niives.com they are filed as design collaborations, apart from the show editions and the finish-artist pieces.
Designs and contributions
The RKMP series, by release:
| Model | Released | Pieces | Steel | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RKMP | November 2025 | 150 | M398 | Gray titanium |
| RKMP Bronze | January 2026 | 150 | M398 | Bronze anodizing |
| Molten KMP | June 2026 | 100 | S90V | Lava & Ash CarboTi inlays |
| Stormy KMP | June 2026 | 100 | S90V | Wind & Rain CarboTi inlays |
At Blade Show Atlanta in June 2025 the RKMP took Knife Collaboration of the Year, and the first run followed that November. The lineage is short. The Boker KMP22 is a flipper with an N690 blade of 80 mm and a G-10 front scale on a stainless steel frame lock, and the RKMP series moves the same shape onto titanium and SRRBS rollers, the single-row bearing the workshop puts under its collaborations with Western makers. All four runs carry the same 90 mm blade, 3.54 in, so the RKMP runs 10 mm longer than the Boker it descends from. Every piece is numbered and ships with the factory certificate, and the US share of each run goes through Recon1, the workshop’s distributor, which runs the US lotteries. The full specification of each run is on the KMP record.
What NIIVES tracks
The four RKMP models are on niives.com, and the KMP record dates each run and its configurations; market observations for them sit in the price record under the collaborations, and where a collaboration sits against the workshop’s serial and Custom Division knives is on the tier ladder. NIIVES reads the factory news feed, where a joint project is announced with its partner, base model, run size and entry rules, Recon1’s release pages for the RKMP lotteries and the KnifeNews and KnifeCenter award coverage each June; his customs and his production work for Benchmade and Boker are outside the catalog.