A luthier’s sample and a milk plastic.

Red Bear Trading Company makes guitar picks by hand, and it has done so, it says, since 2003. Its founder and pick maker is Dave Skowron, who tells the story himself on the company’s website. Around 2001, he writes, he became friends with the luthier John Greven through a website that he and his wife ran for guitar makers and players. Greven had been developing a material he called “Tortis” for pickguards, but it made poor picks. He then found a different material that made poor pickguards but might, he thought, make a decent pick, and sent Skowron a sample pick and a small piece to experiment with.

That material was a casein plastic, which Skowron calls “galalite,” bought from a domestic supplier of binding and pearl-inlay blanks and used at the time mainly for buttons and knife handles. Skowron says he soon decided it was so close in tone and feel to real turtle shell that players could not tell the difference, and that prototypes sent to friends in Nashville confirmed it. Greven could not use the material in his own work, so he passed on the supplier’s details.

The Internet Archive’s earliest copy of redbeartrading.com, from July 2003, shows the business at that point: a page headed “Tortis Flatpicks — No Turtle Tortoise Shell,” offering “Custom CNC Machining, Luthier’s Jigs and Templates” and “the new ‘Tortis’ Picks,” with customer letters addressed to “Dave.” By mid-2005 the same site called them “Cultured Tortoise Shell” and listed retailers across the United States and Canada, among them Elderly Instruments and Dusty Strings, plus a European outlet. The company’s name, Skowron adds, comes from a small red dog the family once had, called Bear.

Milk stone, bevelled by hand.

The material is older than the boutique pick. English Wikipedia describes Galalith as a plastic made by hardening casein, the main protein in milk, with formaldehyde; the name joins the Greek words for milk and stone. It was developed in Germany in the late 1890s, shown at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and used for buttons, combs, jewellery and imitation ivory before oil-based plastics took over. It cannot be moulded once it has set, so it is made in sheets and rods that must be cut and shaped. Red Bear’s website calls the material of its Originals line “Galalith also referred to as Milk Stone or Avoriolina,” and pitches it as the nearest thing to the shell of the hawksbill turtle, a critically endangered species whose trade is regulated under the CITES convention.

The way Red Bear works follows from that material. The company says it uses power sanders to prepare the sheet and a laser to engrave and rough-cut each pick, and that everything else, including every bevel, is done by hand; it says it has had to design and build several of its own machines. Its gauges are ranges rather than exact sizes, because the sheet is sanded by hand: roughly 0.9 to 1.1 mm for Light, up to about 2 mm for Extra Heavy and 2.5 to 4 mm for its “Gypsy Jazzer.” It offers a Standard Bevel and left- or right-handed Speed Bevels, meant to copy the wear pattern of a favourite old pick, and warns that the material is hygroscopic, absorbing moisture, so it sells a “Pick Tonic” oil and tells players not to carry picks loose in a pocket.

Shapes begin on graph paper and are then drawn in CAD, Skowron writes. He says he designed the three-pointed Tri-Tip on a summer trip to Tennessee, and the “Plus” shapes in answer to customer requests. In 2009 the gear blog GuitarGear.org reviewed the Tuff-Tone, a cheaper, tougher material Red Bear had just announced after what it called a few years of development; today it comes in a buff colour in four gauges. Red Bear also makes thumb picks, the Original and the Bear Claw, on bands from the maker Pro-Pik in brass or nickel-silver.

Design and documentation.

These seven pick makers solve one job in very different ways. Two Dutch makers work in thick, bevelled picks. Chicken Picks was started by the guitarist Eppo Franken, who began selling his thermoset picks in 2010; the company says that since 2013 they have been machine-made in Germany and Belgium and hand-finished in the Netherlands. Wegen is the work of Michel Wegen, a professional model maker in Lochem, who says each of his picks is made by hand.

Two American makers work in hard synthetics. V-Picks is the Smith family’s business in Tennessee; Vinni Smith says he first cut acrylic picks in 1980 and revived them in 2003, and the company describes its picks as handmade in the USA. BlueChip, based in Knoxville, Tennessee, says its picks are milled on CNC machines in its own machine shop, Blue Chip Machining.

Two others draw on an older material or a longer history. Red Bear Trading, of Cedar City, Utah, says it has made picks by hand since 2003 from Galalith, a casein plastic made from milk protein. Pickboy is a brand of Nakano Co., Ltd., which says it was founded in Japan in 1967 as a guitar-accessory maker and supplies its celluloid, nylon and polyacetal picks from Japan.

The seventh, Dava, rethinks the pick’s shape rather than its material. Dave Storey says he started the company in 1996; it has been based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since at least 2004, makes multi-gauge picks with a flexible centre section, and says its picks are made in the USA.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two people, one shop in Utah.

Red Bear is very small, and says so. Its FAQ states that the company “consists of exactly two people.” It once sold through a dealer network, it says, but now sells only direct to players, releasing a few styles and colours in its online store roughly once a week, with a “Pickers Choice” sale every ten to fourteen days. It says it makes more than 30 styles in five gauges and fifteen colours, and Skowron writes that he has personally made more than 75,000 picks. Around 2008, he says, the manufacturer of the material contacted Red Bear directly, which opened up more colours; the company names them after gemstones, shells and ivories, and spent about a year developing its own “Rusty Turquoise.”

The shop has moved. Performer Magazine, reviewing the picks in December 2010, called it “Nevada’s Red Bear Trading Company,” with a wait of about five weeks; the company’s website now says it “proudly resides” in Cedar City, Utah. Its endorsement page carries quotes from Guthrie Govan, Jimmy Herring, Frankie Sullivan of Survivor and the flatpicking champion Scott Fore, and an archived 2009 version of the site quoted Dweezil Zappa. Govan has a signature model: a Big Jazzer in extra-heavy gauge with grips, a speed bevel and a serrated top edge “much like a U.S. dime.”

Red Bear calls itself “the first; the original custom pick maker,” and says its work “for all practical purposes created a new industry.” That is the company’s own claim; the review site HubGuitar more cautiously calls it “one of the original boutique pick companies” and credits Skowron with probably re-popularising casein as a pick material. For a design guide, Red Bear shows how a tiny maker can build an identity on one material and one story — a milk plastic standing in for turtle shell. Compare Dunlop, whose Tortex took a mass-produced route to a tortoiseshell substitute, and BlueChip. For this guide we use amber, shell brown, casein ivory and a deep bear red with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Red Bear Trading’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.