Artisan Spotlight: Frank Shaving, the Knot Maker Behind Half the Den

Spend a week reading shave-of-the-day posts in the Shave Dad group and a pattern emerges. The handles change constantly: Chisel and Hound customs, Sawdust Creation Studio one-offs, vintage restorations, house brushes from The Wet Shaving Store. But ask what knot is sitting in them and the same answer keeps coming back. Frank.

Frank Shaving is one of those makers whose work is everywhere while the name stays quiet. The company builds finished brushes under its own label, supplies loose knots to hobbyists and small brush makers, and manufactures house brushes for retailers, including The Wet Shaving Store. And behind the brand is a maker named Ming who has shown up for this community over and over: building custom brushes for the group’s creators, taking one-off commissions from ordinary members, and doing it all with a directness that has earned him real affection here. That is worth a proper spotlight.

The Shop Behind the Knots

Frank Shaving has been at this longer than most of the artisan world. The company behind the brand, The Frank Grooming Industrial Limited, was established in 2000, registered in Hong Kong with its factory in northeastern China. By its own telling, the formula has stayed the same from the start: heavy-density knots, lathe-turned and hand-polished handles, and pricing that keeps performance within reach.

That long OEM heritage matters. Plenty of brushes on the market carry someone else’s badge over a Frank-made knot, and the loose-knot side of the business is a quiet engine of the hobby: many of the custom brushes that come out of small handle-turning shops get finished with a Frank knot, because those knots are easy to buy in consistent grades at a fair price. When Tobin Fetters ranked his favorite synthetics, Frank knots took two of the five spots, in two different makers’ handles.

The Catalog, From Twenty Dollars to Manchurian

The synthetic line is where most people meet the brand. The knots run in generations, G5, G7, G8, G9, each iterating on backbone, tip feel, and water handling, plus specialty fibers alongside them. The G5 has become something of a community standard: enough backbone to load a hard soap, soft enough tips to face lather with, and cheap enough that owning three feels reasonable rather than indulgent.

The G5 fiber itself has more story than most synthetics. It is exclusive to Frank Shaving, and because the fiber mimics real squirrel hair the shop also calls it squirrel synthetic; the name G5 simply marks the fifth generation of the material. The raw fiber comes from BASF in Germany and gets its secondary processing at a fiber factory in Japan before Frank turns it into knots. Its signature trait is antimicrobial: by Frank Shaving’s account, antibiotic constituents are added to the fiber so it resists growing bacteria in the wet conditions a shaving brush lives in, a genuinely practical touch for a tool that spends its life damp on a bathroom counter.

The badger side climbs from pure badger all the way to Manchurian silvertip, the dense, cream-tipped grade at the top of the badger world. That high end has developed its own following among the group’s collectors. Bary Bedford set an artisan handle with an untreated Frank Manchurian silvertip and put it up against the best knot in his den:

There are razors too, safety and straight, including a solid copper three-piece that has made the rounds in group videos, and the usual supporting cast of stands, bowls, and strops. The whole catalog ships worldwide from frankshaving.com.

Ming and the Shave Dad Group

The spotlight is really about the person, though. Ming has a habit of saying yes to this community.

When SIG SOLO wanted a signature brush, Ming built two custom SIG SOLO models, a G5B synthetic and a Manchurian silvertip, and iterated on the design until the branding was exactly as understated as the creator wanted. SIG SOLO’s disclosure from that video says more about the relationship than any spec sheet could:

He did the same for Tobin’s Throwbacks, producing a Tobin’s Throwbacks Edition brush that shows up in the group’s shave-of-the-day videos. And it is not just creators with channels. When Bary wanted a brush to pair with his Alpha Shaving collab razor, he commissioned Frank Shaving directly: a vintage-style blue handle, a 22mm synthetic knot, his logo set in the center and a Texas star on the base. One member, one brush, done.

Add the creator discount codes Frank extends to the group’s reviewers, and the picture is consistent: a maker on the other side of the world treating a Facebook group of enthusiasts like neighbors.

The House Brushes at The Wet Shaving Store

If you want to try a Frank knot without ordering from overseas, you already can. The house brushes at The Wet Shaving Store are built on Frank Shaving knots: the TWSS Black G5 and the TWSS White and Black G5 carry the 26mm G5 synthetic, and the TWSS Faux Horn G7 steps up to the G7 knot in a handsome marbled handle.

Tobin put the G5 house brush in his all-time synthetic top five, in a collection of sixty:

For a beginner assembling a first kit, that combination, a proven knot in an affordable house handle, is about as low-risk as brush buying gets. If you are still working out what knot type suits you at all, our shaving brush guide walks through badger, boar, and synthetic from zero.

Why This Kind of Maker Matters

The wet shaving revival gets told as a story of small-batch soap makers and machined-razor shops, and it is. But it runs on a quieter layer of manufacturers who keep the essential hardware plentiful and affordable, and who choose to engage with the community instead of just selling to it. Frank Shaving has spent a quarter century in that layer, long enough that a whole generation of shavers learned to lather on its knots without ever knowing the name.

The group knows the name now. Between the creator collabs, the member commissions, and the house brushes so many of us load every morning, Frank, and Ming behind it, have more than earned the spotlight.

Happy shaving.