Blaise “The Wolf” Dozorme: Four Generations in Thiers
In 1902, in La Monnerie-le-Montel near Thiers, expert steelworker Blaise Dozorme opened a small knife-making workshop in his own home. His professionalism as a subcontractor to other Thiers cutlers earned him real notoriety in the region, along with a nickname that still defines the brand today: “the Wolf,” bestowed for his dominant, determined personality — and later adopted as the basis for the company’s logo.
His son Valentin took over the workshop in 1934, expanding it through the cutlery industry’s 1970s boom, working with wood, olive, juniper, and horn handles across folding, hunting, and table knives. The business passed to Valentin’s son, Claude Dozorme, who — together with his wife Eliane — invested heavily in tools and mechanization, and made the decision to put the family’s own name on the brand for the first time. It was under Claude that the company created its first non-folding Laguiole table knife in the early 1980s. In 1991, Claude’s daughter Claudine Dozorme took over as the fourth generation, building out the brand’s sales and marketing and eventually founding La Grande Coutellerie, a retail chain with boutiques in Cannes, Paris, and Clermont-Ferrand.
It’s a genuinely rare thing in French manufacturing: one family, one town, four documented generations from workshop subcontractor to internationally distributed heritage brand — with a fifth generation’s name still on every knife that leaves the factory.
