Igor Shirogorov
Игорь Широгоров
Co-founder and production lead, Shirogorov Brothers Workshop
Igor Shirogorov was the co-founder of the Shirogorov Brothers Workshop in Yaroslavl with his older brother Sergey, its machinist and production lead from 2005 until his death in 2015, and the workshop has shipped every knife under both brothers’ names since.
Todd Eby, NIIVES
Biography
Igor trained in CNC machining at Yaroslavl Higher Vocational School, and in 2005 he proposed to Sergey, who was by then making folding knives professionally from a home workshop, that they build the business together. The division of labor that followed is the workshop in a sentence: Sergey designed, and Igor made the machines produce what Sergey drew.
In the first years Igor was at the bench and the lathe as much as at the controls: assembly and turning were his before the CNC machines were. The brothers outgrew the apartment, took industrial premises and hired their first assistants.
Igor died in a car crash on 14 June 2015. The full account is on The Shirogorov story.
Designs and contributions
Igor designed none of the workshop’s serial or Custom Division releases. The designs are Sergey’s. His contribution was the production behind them: the bench work of the early years and, as a certified CNC operator, the machine park through which every serial knife of his lifetime, from the F95 of 2010 to the NeOn of 2015, was made.
| Year | Contribution |
|---|---|
| 2005 | Joins Sergey; proposes the joint business; assembly and turning |
| 2007 | Serial folding-knife production begins |
| 2008 to 2009 | Move from the apartment to industrial premises; first assistants; LLC MBSH registered 2009 |
| 2010 to 2015 | Machine park built out; the F95, 111, F3, Hati and NeOn enter serial production |
What NIIVES tracks
No entity page on niives.com lists Igor as a designer, and no market observation is keyed to his name; he appears where the workshop’s history does, on The Shirogorov story and in its chronology. NIIVES reads the workshop’s own site for the company record and uses no personal site or dealer page for Igor.