Museums by day, picks in the spare hours.

Wegen Picks is the work of Michel Wegen, a Dutch professional model-maker. His website introduces him in his own words: he runs his own shop and “usually work[s] for museums, advertisement agencies, attraction parks, hospitals,” and in his spare time likes “to study other people’s problems and try to invent solutions.” One of those solutions, he writes, was a pick for gypsy jazz, the acoustic swing style that grew out of Django Reinhardt’s music.

The pick business was online early. The oldest copy of wegenpicks.com in the Internet Archive dates from January 2001 and already offers what it calls “Standard picks” for gypsy jazz — 3.5mm thick, 30mm long and 26mm wide, with grooves on both sides and a beveled, curved tip that made a difference “if you’re right- or lefthanded.” At that time the site said each pick took him almost an hour and a half of “sawing, milling, shaping and polishing,” that he charged 20 US dollars including postage, and that “if you are a professional guitarist, and I like your music, an autographed CD will do!” He called it a hobby, and said the money would probably go into projects for disabled people he was working on.

The same 2001 page gave a village address in Overijssel and said he expected to move that year; the site now gives a post-office box in Lochem, in Gelderland, for correspondence. A separate page shows the model-making that pays the bills: airbrushed car bonnets, mice made for a theme park, a museum reconstruction of an extinct cave lion and a life-size figure in glassfibre.

Thick, grooved and beveled by hand.

The original pick, renamed the Gypsyjazzpick, keeps the 2001 dimensions. Wegen says the material he uses sounds “very close to tortoise, but it is lasting much longer”; he does not name it, and neither do we. Each Gypsyjazzpick has a beveled, curved tip made for a right- or left-handed player, grooves for grip and a concave, grooved thumb side. “I’ve improved this pick just a few times for the better,” he writes, “and my customers and I cant think of any more ideas to offer a better gypsyjazzpick. I’m done here.”

Other models followed, each identified by the colour of its packet. The Fatone, a 5mm “fat-tone” pick, comes in green packets; the GP 250, a 2.5mm Gypsyjazzpick, has white inserts; the Twins, a mini Gypsyjazzpick measuring 27.5mm by 23.3mm, has orange inserts and is described as “Michel’s favorite.” There are 1.4mm bluegrass picks in blue packets; the Bigcity pick, a 1.8mm jazz pick developed with the Connecticut dealer Big City String Company; the M100 and M150 for mandolin; and the triangular Trimus series in 2.5mm, 3.5mm and 5mm, which Wegen says is made with “self-designed and self-made tools.” The thinner TF triangles carry a “fingerprint” surface and seven holes for grip. Newer names include the Dipper, the Button and the Yeux Noir.

Wegen says “each pick is made by hand” and offers custom picks — he gives the example of a pick exactly 3.45mm thick, 34.3mm long and 27.25mm wide — as well as the whole range in black as well as white, in the same material. A notice on the site announced a price increase from 1 June 2023 because of inflation.

Picks as a design object.

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 hand-coded website and a world of dealers.

Wegen’s picks travel much further than his website suggests. The site lists more than 50 dealer locations, and its dealer page runs from Canadian shops in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec to American retailers including Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan, Dusty Strings in Seattle and the Flatpicking Mercantile in Pulaski, Virginia. In October 2026 Elderly’s online shop listed 38 Wegen items, among them the 3.5mm Gypsy Jazz pick at $19, Trimus, Twins, Dipper, Big City, bluegrass and mandolin picks, in white and black and in left-handed versions.

The site’s links page is a roll-call of the gypsy-jazz world, pointing to players and shops such as Joscho Stephan, the Robin Nolan Trio, John Jorgenson, Gonzalo Bergara, Pearl Django in Seattle and the Hot Club of Hungary, and to a page of customer reports. Those are links and testimonials chosen by Wegen, not endorsement deals, and we treat them that way.

The brand itself is barely designed in the corporate sense, and that is its character. Wegenpicks.com is still a hand-coded page with pop-up image windows, model names such as “GP 250 (This is a project name, we’ll think of a proper name later on)” and a first-person voice throughout. The identity lives in the product: thick white or black picks, deep grip grooves, handed bevels, and packets colour-coded by model — yellow for the Gypsyjazzpick, green for the Fatone, blue for bluegrass, purple, sunflower yellow and dark green for the three Trimus picks.

For a design guide, Wegen shows how a maker’s voice and a colour-coded packet system can carry a brand with almost no graphic identity at all. Compare BlueChip Picks, the Tennessee machine shop’s brown composite picks, and Gravity Picks, the Californian maker of thick acrylic picks. For this guide we use pick white, pick black and the packet yellow, green and blue with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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