Mure & Peyrot, the emerging global professional knife ingot

QWhen we think of knives, we usually think of the Thiers department in Puy-de-Dôme, and more generally of Auvergne. When we think of Mure & Peyrot, a Bordeaux SME (small or medium-sized enterprise) that produces safety knives for cutting jobs for the industries we also call cutters, we can also think of Puy-de-Dôme. In fact, this department, or rather the commune of La Monnerie-le-Montel, was the starting point of the company.

“I decided that we needed to make ourselves indispensable in niche markets such as professional cutting and ultra-specialty knives”

In the beginning, one hundred and twenty years ago, this was the craft business of the two Mure brothers Antoine and Claude. Thanks to the expansion of the founding family through intermarriage, Ernest Peyrot became the manager on September 21, 1955, before becoming Mure & Peyrot in 1950. The traditional activity, focused on special cutlery, will experience strong growth.

Bordeaux’s success story

The Mure & Peyrot company, led by Ernest Peyrot, is experiencing momentum. He will choose another destiny and location according to his son’s destiny. In fact, reluctant to stay in Puy-de-Dôme, Jean-Claude Peyrot was reluctant to follow in his father’s footsteps and left to study engineering in Paris. And if he decides to take over the management of the company after his first career in the oil industry, he will do so remotely, from Bordeaux… Before starting, he has always been involved in the professional cutlery trade since the Gironde capital. While the Auvergne company weakened and eventually went bankrupt, that of Bordeaux made progress and in 1983 Bordeaux would be the definitive center of the Mure & Peyrot activity, taken over by Jean-Claude Peyrot in 1975. The history of Auvergne and the beginning of the success story of Bordeaux.

“I decided that we had to make ourselves indispensable in niche markets such as professional cutting and ultra-specialty knives. From industry to catering, including the automotive and agri-food industries. Markets whose volumes did not concern European or Asian competitors,” explains Jean-Claude Peyrot. The SME he managed became a world leader in certain markets, such as the cutting of plastic materials for windshields, a little-known but strategic market. “We won the Saint-Gobain market. Then I identified its competitors, which were few in number, contacted them… and we won those markets,” comments the manager. The latter, who was prudent, was never part of the entrepreneurial circles and associations of the Bordeaux region: “This is not my style, I prefer to act rather than talk. »

Action, innovation, mastery

The workshop “take action” to achieve an annual turnover of 5 million euros, 48% of which comes from exports to 70 countries, while also constantly innovating, offering safer and more efficient products and, finally, controlling its production thanks to the five injection presses installed in the company. “We have always innovated a lot and invested a lot, especially in our war chest, the plastic injection moulds! After all, we design and produce our professional range of knives ourselves. We have 35 patents and we regularly develop our products, especially thanks to our own Novatech design office with its own 3D printers, to give shape to our ideas and our own knives. »

First electric cutter

“Ideas” that are certainly innovative but sometimes not very marketable: “We have recently launched the first electric safety knife with a vibrating, serrated blade that can effortlessly cut through very thick cardboard. The market is not very large and it will be difficult to make the necessary investment to develop it profitably, but this knife is a technological showcase of our know-how. No one else can do it; this is a strong signal to our 3,000 customer companies!”, assures those who can afford it, only this time, to bet on show instead of business.

“Our success is based on our innovation, the quality of our products, the multitude of customers and sectors we address, our ability to deliver from Bordeaux to the entire world in just seven days from ordering and, finally, the loyalty of our team,” analyzes Jean-Claude Peyrot. It is hard to argue with this strategy: Mure & Peyrot is a profitable company and a leader in many markets with only around ten employees.