A hacksaw, a grinding wheel and a pair of jeans.

V-Picks began with a sheet of acrylic. Vinni Smith, a guitarist who, by his own account, worked a day job and played rock gigs in the evenings, says that in 1980 he was unhappy with every pick he tried. His heroes were Peter Frampton, Ed King, Brian May and Barry Bailey. He tried wood, metal and rubber and, after learning that Brian May and Billy Gibbons played with coins, ground down foreign coins. Then, he writes, he saw a type of clear acrylic in a store — he kept a plexiglass saltwater aquarium at home — bought a sheet, cut shapes with a hacksaw and ground a bevel and point on a grinding wheel. A younger co-worker buffed them in his high-school shop class; otherwise Smith polished them on his jeans. He made about 50 and gave them to friends and bandmates.

Then the picks were forgotten. Smith says he gave up the guitar, sold his instruments and spent four or five years on the saxophone, with David Sanborn as his model. When he came back to the guitar to play country music, the old picks never crossed his mind, and he began grinding down silver quarters and Franklin half dollars instead. In 2003, he writes, while the family was remodelling the house, he found one of his old clear, triangular picks at the bottom of a gig bag.

He took it to the house of his friend and fellow guitarist John Dean, and the two decided to start making them again. Smith suggested calling it “the Plexi-Pick”; Dean held it up and called it “the V-Pick.” Smith says he assumed the name described the shape, and only later realised that Dean had named it after him. English Wikipedia also credits Dean with the name.

From guitar forums to Tennessee.

The picks found their first buyers online. Smith says he sent them to friends on guitar forums around the world, that one urged him to stop giving them away and sell them on The Gear Page, and that another started a thread on the Birds and Moons forum. The first price was $5 a pick, or three for $12, and his wife, Nancy Smith — “Mrs. V,” an artist — designed the website. The company’s own About page in 2009 described V-Picks Inc. as a small family business founded by Vinni and Nancy Smith in the Central Valley of California, and said that although Vinni first made the picks in 1980, “the company was not started until 2006.” MusicRadar gave the same year in May 2010. English Wikipedia says the company was started in 2004 and incorporated in 2008, and the site’s copyright line runs from 2004; the earliest copy of v-picks.com in the Wayback Machine dates from April 2006.

That 2006 page set out the idea in one line — “The Final Step In Guitar Pick Evolution” — and offered a clear acrylic pick in three sizes, all 0.100 inch thick, that would “stick” to the fingers. The range grew fast: more than 20 models by 2008, more than 30 by 2009 and over 45 by mid-2010, from 0.8 mm “Ultra Lites” to an 11.5 mm block. MusicRadar, reviewing a set for Guitar Techniques in May 2010, described Smith as the owner of “V-Picks based in California” and singled out the 11.85 mm Insanity and the Freakishly Large Ruby Red, which it said was designed for Carlos Santana. By then the home page was calling V-Picks “The World’s #1 Guitar Pick” and carried the slogan “Never Drop Your Pick Again!” — still the brand’s line in 2026 — along with a “Patent Pending” notice.

The family then moved east. Smith writes that they moved to Nashville in 2010; English Wikipedia dates the move of the headquarters from California to Tennessee to 2011. The current contact page lists Bon Aqua, in Hickman County southwest of Nashville, and describes picks “handmade in Nashville TN.”

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.

A pick that warms up and holds on.

The material is the brand. V-Picks are made of acrylic; English Wikipedia describes a proprietary mixture of two acrylics and an inert material, chosen, the maker says, for a pick that grips as it warms in the player’s fingers. Reviewers noticed the same thing: in a 2011 review for Music Gear Review, John Gorbe wrote that the picks were “handmade with an acrylic material that gets sticky as it heats up between your thumb and fingers,” and called them “the most versatile picks you will find on the market.” The company’s line today is that its picks “warm to your touch and then cling to your fingers.” Wikipedia also describes the process — some picks laser-cut from cast acrylic sheet and others poured into moulds, then ground by hand on a bench grinder, trimmed with a razor knife, heat-tempered and flame-buffed — but the review it cites does not describe it, so we give it as unconfirmed. The site itself says simply “Handmade in the USA.”

The range is broad. Gorbe tested the 2.75 mm Tradition, the Medium Pointed Lite, the Ruby Red Medium Rounded with its thumb dent, the Switchblade and Stiletto with unbuffed edges, and the Screamer in a “Pearly Gates” version. The company now claims more than 100 models for electric and acoustic guitar, mandolin, bass and dulcimer, plus therapeutic picks for players with hand and arm injuries, and says it sells through more than 400 US stores. Its artist list starts with Carlos Santana and Billy Gibbons — “Ask Gibbons & Santana,” says the home page — and includes Brad Whitford, Phil Keaggy, Johnny Hiland and Vernon Reid. Those are the company’s claims, though MusicRadar also linked one model to Santana in 2010. The business remains, in its own words, family owned, and we found no outside owner in the sources we checked.

For a design guide, V-Picks shows how a material can become an identity: a clear, bevelled pick, a name given by a friend and a promise that you will never drop it. Compare Gravity Picks, a later Californian acrylic pick maker, and Dunlop, the mass-market maker whose picks fill the racks. For this guide we use ruby red, clear ice and a night-glow green with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep V-Picks’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.