In the world of knife handles and knife accessories, the name Culpepper is synonymous with natural and exotic supplies of high quality. Culpepper & Co. manufactures for and distributes to custom knifemakers, cutlery manufacturers and several companies that are somewhere in between.

The Culpepper family business had been known as Mother of Pearl Co. for the past 12 years until recently, when the name was changed to Culpepper & Co. to coincide with a move to a new building. Mother of Pearl Co. no longer defines the business properly, according to Joe Culpepper, company owner and son of the founder, David Culpepper. After all, the business offers an extensive variety of natural materials in addition to mother-of-pearl—from bone and stone to coral, sambar stag and ancient ivory.

“The name is something we’ve wanted to change back to for several years now,” Joe explained. “Mother-of-pearl and other shell material continues to be major product lines for us. But even though all of our pearl product lines continue to grow, pearl sales combine for less than 20 percent of our total business.”

Culpepper said “change back to” because his father started in 1972 under the name D.A. Culpepper Co. When Joe bought his father’s interest and the business incorporated in 1995, the name was changed to Mother of Pearl Co.

“My father started becoming interested collecting knives in the early 1970s, once our family moved to North Carolina from Miami, Florida,” Culpepper began. “Early on, he came to know [Blade Magazine Cutlery Hall-Of-Famer©] Bruce Voyles. He also met [Cutlery Hall-Of-Famer] Jim Parker, Jim Frost and many other soon-to-be cutlery legends. He, of course, offered to cut some slabs of material for them. And the rest is history.”

The year was 1976 and the company was housed in a 300-square-foot basement shop. Dave began attending shows regularly and by 1982 experienced his first Knifemakers’ Guild Show.

“It’s about this time that I started helping him in his shop,” Joe recalled. “That is to say, I knew the difference between a rock and a shell.” By 1986, the shop had expanded to 1,500 square feet and Joe was working for free—“at least when Dad could get me to work,” he grinned.

In 1992, Culpepper & Co. bought a small ivory carving factory in China and gradually began producing bone tiles there. “This really paved our way into bone production,” Joe said. “In 1994, Dad and Mom [Barbara] split, and he moved to Florida to start another company. I bought his share of the company and Mom got the other half. We incorporated our knife handle business in 1995 and expanded to 4,500 square feet.”

In 2000, Joe’s wife Kristi came on board full time. The business has been organized and efficient ever since. “Dad’s old methods—which I carried on, of course—of handwritten invoices, rotary dial phones and pick-a-number pricing at shows were gone forever,” he admitted.

In 2003, Joe and Kristi bought out Barbara’s share of the company. Also by then they had bought a new factory in China.

With his team of over 90 employees and Kristi, “the rock [who] manages the day-to-day operations, decisions, finances and paperwork,” Culpepper is free to continue to do what he’s seemingly always done: “talk to customers, cut pearl most everyday, and travel abroad searching for new materials.”

With plans already in place to expand into a new facility, a building that fit their needs almost perfectly came available. The Culpeppers closed on the 18,500-square-foot former school building in February 2007. It sits on 7.5 acres, which leaves room for future expansion.

“Our new facility, first and foremost, will allow us to grow with new space for equipment, employees, workstations and division and organization of production functions,” Culpepper surmised. “Organization is the key word here.”

Culpepper & Co. is not just a materials supplier. It also manufactures scales from raw materials. For example, it cuts raw materials such as cow shinbone, sambar antler and pearl shells into rectangular scales or other shapes as needed. The materials are then flat sanded with surface grinders, belt grinders, or CNC (computer numerically controlled) face mills or planers, depending on the material and the application.

From there, the surface, or front side, is sometimes left natural, usually with regard to stag or ram horn, Culpepper explained. For bone, the surface might be textured, jigged or radiused. For pearl or coral, the face is usually surface ground and then brought to a polish.

Once flat on the back, many of the slabs, tiles or handles are ready to be sent to manufacturers in the USA or abroad. Lately, though, many manufacturers require further steps. “We’ve seen a recent trend toward pre-shaping,” Culpepper said, “primarily because technology is beginning to become more affordable when compared to traditional stock-removal methods.”

Several years ago, Culpepper & Co. began offering extremely accurate and repeatable automated cutting and shaping through the use of CNC. It does custom two-dimensional and 3-D milling and shaping with predrilled pin and screw holes, custom fit to the manufacturers’ specifications. “Primarily, we do this for more exotic materials, such as various mother-of-pearl, corals, stone and inlays for cutlery companies, furniture inlay and musical instrument manufacturers,” Culpepper noted.

The materials that the company offers come from all over. Culpepper said that white and gold-lip pearl comes from the South Pacific—Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia. Black-lip pearl comes from French Polynesia. Most of the abalone comes from northern California and is now a protected species.

He added that pearl and abalone continue to be increasingly difficult to find. (For more on hard-to-find handle materials, see page 10.) It is done the old-fashioned way, with divers going underwater to seek the materials out because it is the only way to get pearl and abalone large enough for knife handles. “Generally speaking and in my experience,” he observed, “shells grown in captivity won’t reach larger sizes because, one, the farmers won’t allow them to grow, and two, the shells do better on their own in the wild.”

Culpepper & Co. also offers giraffe bone, kudu horn, many exotic woods, well over 300 different colors of bone and over 100 different patterns of bone jigging and patterning. According to Culpepper, the company developed amber stag enhancement, a dye that is becoming quite common, especially on custom knives. The company uses the handsome dye effect on slabs, rosettes, tapers and full horns.

“As far as natural materials go,” Culpepper stated, “the marketplace will continue to see a decrease in the premium materials and the largest sizes. Demand will simply continue to exceed supply. We’re already seeing it for abalone.

“Additionally, we continue to see a trend toward government regulation of natural resources and protected status for many of the natural materials. Sambar stag that came out of India is a prime example, as is elephant ivory.”

For the custom market, Culpepper said natural materials will continue as a very popular choice, since that is what most collectors want.

“For the traditional slip-joint factories, at least here in the U.S., I’ve noticed a small trend away from synthetics,” he added. “I know we’ve done some good business recently for bone handles that previously we might have lost to Delrin, Staglon, plastic or Pakkawood.”

He said he figured that the market will see of lot of stag-handle knives, especially from traditional slip-joint manufacturers. Stag was gone for so long since all the synthetics became available that the market is hot for it again. “You’ll also see a lot of variations on stag with tinting and coloring,” he advised.

“We’ve found a way to get more yields from sambar stag antler, but it’s a secret,” he winked. “We’ve also got a new material that we’re developing, but again, I’m not quite ready to divulge it.”

The knife community will be waiting.