If you grew up in the 1990s or 2000s, there’s a good chance that you, or someone you knew, sold Cutco knives.

Maybe it was a cousin home from college for the summer. Maybe it was a friend who suddenly wanted to “practice a presentation” in your parents’ kitchen. Maybe you remember the scissors cutting through a penny or the salesman slicing a tomato paper-thin while explaining the forever guarantee.

For decades, Cutco and its direct-sales arm, Vector Marketing, became one of the most recognizable entry-level sales jobs in America.

The company itself goes back much further. Cutco was founded in 1949 in Olean, New York, originally as a kitchen knife manufacturer tied to Alcoa. The knives were expensive, American-made, and built around the idea that they would last forever. Many actually did. One of the company’s biggest selling points became its “Forever Guarantee,” which allowed customers to send knives back for sharpening or replacement at almost any time.

But the real story—and controversy—started with how the knives were sold.

In the early 1980s, Vector Marketing began recruiting college students aggressively. The pitch was appealing: flexible schedules, good money, and no prior experience required. Students attended group interviews in office parks and hotel conference rooms, then learned a tightly structured in-home sales presentation built around demonstrations, objection handling, referrals, and relationship selling.

For many people, it was their first exposure to sales.

The company became famous for recruiting through handwritten flyers, newspaper classifieds, postcard mailers, and eventually online job boards. In some towns, nearly every college student seemed to know someone who had gone to a Vector interview.

The experience could vary wildly depending on the office and manager. Some students quit after a week. Others became top reps making surprisingly large commissions selling knife sets to family friends, teachers, dentists, and neighbors.

The job also became polarizing.

Over the years, Vector faced lawsuits and criticism over its recruiting practices and compensation structure. One recurring controversy involved advertisements emphasizing “base pay,” which many recruits interpreted as hourly wages when the pay was often tied to completed appointments. In 1990, Vector paid roughly $13 million in a settlement related to misleading job advertising claims in several states while denying wrongdoing.

The company remained a frequent topic of debate online long before social media existed. Message boards in the early 2000s were filled with stories from former reps—some calling it exploitative, others defending it passionately.

And despite the criticism, many successful salespeople still point to Cutco as the place where they first learned how to sell.

The training focused heavily on fundamentals: maintaining eye contact, asking for referrals, staying organized, following scripts, handling rejection, and learning how to sit in uncomfortable conversations without panicking. A surprising number of former reps later ended up in medical sales, software sales, real estate, financial services, and entrepreneurship.

The knives themselves also developed a strange cultural durability. Families passed them down. Parents who bought them in the 1980s still use them today. Even people who hated the sales process often admitted the products held up.

Today, Cutco still operates out of Olean and continues to use a version of the direct-sales model that made it famous, though recruiting now happens largely through social media, online ads, and college networking instead of bulletin boards and newspaper classifieds. The company has also expanded into online ordering, corporate gifting, and partnerships with professional kitchens and outdoor brands. While the culture around sales jobs has changed dramatically since the 1990s, Cutco remains one of the few old-school direct-sales organizations that never fully disappeared.

That combination—high-pressure recruiting, legitimate sales training, and genuinely durable products—is part of why Cutco stayed around while so many other direct-sales organizations faded away.

For thousands of young people, it became a strange rite of passage: a summer job that was equal parts awkward, educational, stressful, and weirdly memorable.