Joseph Opinel began making knives in 1890 in Savoie, France as a simple working man's or peasant's knife.

[7][4][1] From 1901 to 1903, Joseph Opinel built his first factory in Pont de Gévoudaz and produced a machine for mass production of the knife's wooden handles.

[7] A few years later Opinel annual sales were in the hundreds of thousands, and by the start of World War II as many as 20 million knives had been sold.

The Opinel Slim Effilé series uses a tapered handle with a slender clip point blade made of Sandvik stainless steel, and the handle may be obtained in a variety of different materials, including bubinga, olive, ebony and cowhorn.

[11] Due to the way in which the locking collar tapers, the blade does not loosen over time and can be fixed firmly even once the mechanism is quite worn.

[8] The company's large demand for beechwood not infrequently results in a shortage of precut handle blanks, forcing the use of rectangular (bulk) sheets, which generate considerable wood waste.

8 knife consists of 5 pieces (formerly 4); the handle, the blade, the pivot or axle, the metal collar and the locking ring or "Virobloc".

Original Opinels and the smallest sizes today are still made of only 4 parts, lacking the simple Virobloc locking mechanism.

8 Couteau du Jardin or Garden Knife uses a folding drop-point blade with a slim, tapered wood handle, while the Opinel No.

The Opinel Slim Effile series use a thinner-profile stainless steel blade fitted to a tapered wood handle.

Available in several sizes and handle materials, the Slim Effile knives are intended for tasks such as cleaning and fileting fish and thinly slicing meats and cheeses.

[14] Those practiced in the art of coup du savoyard grip the metal collar between index finger and thumb and tap the heel of the handle firmly on a hard surface, as if using it as a drumstick; the blade should open slightly from the handle, allowing it to be rotated into position with the thumb.

The image of the hand comes from the arms of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, and represents the relics of John the Baptist, three of whose finger-bones were supposedly brought back from Alexandria by Saint Tecla in the 5th century.

Besides the Slim Effile series and the Couteau du Jardin, Opinel also offers a hawkbill-bladed pruning knife designed for use in the garden or vineyard, and a large folding wood saw with locking blade using the same Virobloc mechanism as found on large Opinel knives.