Opinel
Knife maker in Chambéry, Savoie, France, producing the Opinel folding knife since 1890.
Opinel is a family-run French knife company based in Chambéry, in the Savoie region of the French Alps. In 1890, 18-year-old Joseph Opinel designed a small wood-handled pocket knife in his family's edge-tool workshop in Gevoudaz, a hamlet of Albiez-le-Vieux, and in 1897 he produced it in twelve sizes numbered No. 01 to No. 12. The company moved to Cognin, near Chambéry, in 1915, and its Revériaz site in Chambéry has been the main site and headquarters since 2003.
Since 1909 every Opinel blade has been stamped with the Crowned Hand emblem. In 1955 Marcel Opinel invented the Virobloc, a rotating ferrule that locks the blade open; it was modified in 2000 to also lock the blade closed. Opinel launched its first polymer-handled knife in 2012 and its forged kitchen-knife collection, Les Forgés 1890, in 2019.
Today the company makes pocket knives, kitchen knives, table knives, knives for children and small garden tools. It reports 180 employees, about 6.5 million knives a year and sales in 70 countries, and in 2016 opened its first foreign subsidiary, Opinel USA, in Chicago. The Opinel name entered the Larousse dictionary in 1989.
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