The original knife, designed long ago by Bob Fairchild's father, is at bottom; the modern Cheese Knife is at top.

david sanders / arizona daily star

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Myra and Bob Fairchild's Cheese Knife is catching on with customers nationwide, prompting the couple to move their manufacturing and packaging across the Pacific — to Tucson.

Like many people who build a better mousetrap but don't know how to get it to market, the Fairchilds originally worked with a consultant who lined up the usual third parties and plants, resulting in a product that sported the ubiquitous three words "Made in China."

But after consorting with the right bunch of creative local minds, the local couple realized that moving all aspects of production to Tucson would offer overwhelming advantages. It would improve the quality of the knife, would mean more environmentally friendly production and packaging, and it would save money.

In case you missed that last part, the Fairchilds save money — significant money — by having it manufactured in Tucson rather than China. At least $2 per knife, Myra Fairchild said.

"There is a big misconception that China is the big low-cost provider. In a lot of situations, they are," said Ken Motz, plant manager for Schnipke Southwest LLC, which manufactures medical components and dozens of other injection-molded products. "But what the Fairchilds have shown is that you can do business with us and still bring a product to people at a reasonable cost at a reasonable margin and allow suppliers locally to participate in that success as well."

Schnipke Southwest is a division of Schnipke Engraving Co. of Ottoville, Ohio. The company opened a 90,000-square-foot plant in 2003 at 6350 E. Littletown Road.

Myra and Bob Fairchild financed and marketed the Cheese Knife based on one invented and developed and more than 60 years ago by Bob Fairchild's father. The plastic knife has scalloped ridges that allow it to cleanly slice through the gummiest of cheeses and other foods.

It caught on fast at stores such as Tabletalk, which began selling the knife for $19.95 at all three of its Tucson stores about a year and a half ago. The Fairchilds pushed the knife at trade shows and on the QVC cable shopping network, and they now sell it to a variety of retailers in a dozen states, Myra Fairchild said. Sales of the knives are in the "tens of thousands," she said.

After having about 40,000 of the knives manufactured and packaged overseas, the Fairchilds sought advice from Michael Eddy of Tucson Business Graphics on how to cut costs and red tape. Eddy had done the layout and design work on the knife's original packaging.

"They came to me because they were sick of dealing with China and other people that were ripping them off," Eddy said.

The first thing Eddy did was rework the packaging of the knife, he said. It was a one-size-fits-all morass of over-engineered plastic — the Fort Knox-style contraptions that often require a sharp knife and considerable patience to open, followed by a trip to the medicine cabinet for a Band-Aid.

Eddy came up with an attractive, streamlined, pie-shaped package that's much easier to open and uses about a third of the material, Myra Fairchild said.

"It looks so much better, and you wouldn't believe how much my postage has gone down," she said.

In April, the Fairchilds contacted local engineer Greg Rett- berg, a mold maker who had worked at another local company but had just taken a job in business development at Schnipke, Myra Fairchild said.

"Greg kind of brought the Fairchilds to us, and though we work with some very large companies, we also work with a lot of companies even smaller than the Fairchilds, where we'll design the tooling, design the end product and help them manufacture it," Motz said.

The knives are made at Schnipke, boxed in packaging made next door at Whitmark Packaging Inc., then warehoused and distributed at Schnipke.

Schnipke not only improved on the injection molds the Fairchilds originally used, but also is working with them on designing an entire product line based on the Cheese Knife, Rettberg said.

The line being developed includes a larger knife, a bread knife with a serrated edge, a cake knife, a pie knife and an ice-cream scoop, Rettberg said.

Even the prototypes for those future products are made in Tucson, as Motz works with a new local company, Solid Concepts Inc., 3280 E. Hemisphere Loop.

"What I really love about this is the synergy of it," Myra Fairchild said. "Keeping it all here and doing it in a much more environmentally friendly way with all these great people is just fantastic."