Industrial spring manufacturers have increasingly high production rates with ever finer dimensional requirements. Today, they use tensile tests to evaluate the mechanical behavior of the wires they use to produce their springs. However, this type of test is not easy to handle in an industrial context, because of all the requirements needed for tensile testing, especially when it is done on small diameter wires. Thus, spring manufacturers are interested in replacing the conventional tensile testing by a much simpler and quicker testing. This work proposes an empirical approach for mechanical behavior characterization of small diameter wires, which relies on a three-point bending test and a material isotropy assumption. This approach is designed to fit into an industrial process because it offers a sufficiently accurate characterization of the wires for industrial purpose, and it avoids the biases that can be introduced by the tensile testing method. In this article, this characterization approach was applied to a cold-drawn 0.8mm wire, made of AISI 302 austenitic steel, with very satisfying results.