offer mid to higher end steels but still be able to keep the cost relatively low
The mid & higher end steels are (typically) more expensive, typically from labor costs.
Finding US source steel is going to be complicated at best. Any extra-national steel is always going to be at risk of tariff, boycott, trade war or the like.
A knife factory is not just a couple of lathes and a milling machine or two. Industrial design is an engineering discipline, and is as unforgiving as any other rules-based discipline. Scale is hugely important, too. Numeric control, whether manual or computer based is not a cure-all.
If you are making ten of a product, you might can use a single machine for that one run (note that each one of those has to be priced to pay for the entire run, labor, taxes, costs, and all the overhead). More than a thousand or so, you need a machine that does one process at a time. per each process needed to make the part. That way the machine can be set up to use one fixture or jig, and have just the one cutting tool (which can be gauged for tolerance, to know when to replace it). Reducing the set up time is critical in volume production.
Volume production means your main overhead (per product) is machine time and not labor time.
It's one thing to be Mike Loveless in a long paid-for shop and a payroll of one, and quite another to be Benchmade.
Look at who is doing well there and see how long they have been at it to get a glimpse of the potential. Also study the history of Gerber, Kershaw, Western, Camillus, PAL, Utica, Queen City and a host of other cutlery producers long gone. It would take brilliant marketing, low cost production resources and talented design acumen to succeed, but if you can put the pieces together for the long haul, go for it.
