Scissor manufacturer Fiskars from Finland is celebrating its 375th birthday

2024-05-07 20:07:48

For once, superlatives are appropriate at Fiskars, as the Finnish company is celebrating its 375th birthday this year. This makes it not only the oldest still existing company in the country, but also one of the oldest in the Western world. What began in 1649 as an ironworks in the village of Fiskars is now a listed company called the Fiskars Group, which, in addition to the Fiskars brand, includes a number of other big names from the north: Iittala from Finland, Royal Copenhagen and Georg Jensen from Denmark, but also Wedgwood porcelain from England. Most people have probably already had the most successful Fiskars product in their hands: scissors with orange handles. Or, if you’re left-handed, the version with red handles. In 1967 the scissors were released, the first ever with plastic handles.

Fiskars, one of the oldest companies in the Western world, turns 375 years old.Pursue

Fiskars has sold more than a billion scissors to date, and the design by factory designer Olof Bäckström is one of the Finnish design classics – even if the scissors are perhaps less prominent than Alvar Aalto’s furniture and vases or Marimekko’s Unikko floral design. The scissors are now available in many colors, but the company has trademarked the special Fiskars orange. Of course, the cutting tool was and is still copied.

Orange by chance?

From today’s perspective, the color may seem typical of a mass-produced product from the late 1960s, but in fact the coloring was probably a coincidence. Legend has it that when the first prototypes of the scissors were to be manufactured, there was still orange plastic from another product in the machine. However, the team liked the trendy handles so much that the originally planned tones of black, green and red were discarded.

Orange plastic can now also be found in many other Fiskars products, such as the axes, pruning shears, shovels and other garden tools for which the Finns are known. Even in the early days, Fiskars produced, among other things, knives and hoes, as well as nails, threads and iron wheels. In 1649, Peter Thorwöste received permission to build a blast furnace in the village west of Helsinki. At that time, Finland was under Swedish rule, and the iron ore smelted in Fiskars came from near Stockholm.

In the 18th century, mainly copper ores from a nearby mine were processed until supplies ran out and the blast furnace was shut down completely. Since then, Fiskars has primarily processed pig iron and later steel; it has produced cutlery since 1832 and machines since 1837, including Finland’s first steam engine. At the beginning of the 20th century, agricultural equipment was an important business, with more than a million plows leaving the factory by 1930.

Today there is no longer any production at the place where the company was founded; in 1972 production began in nearby Billnäs. Scissors, axes and snow clearing equipment are manufactured there, and the company has additional production facilities in Sorsakoski, Finland, and in Poland. The Fiskars Group has developed the village of Fiskars itself into a center for art and design in recent years. In the “Fiskars Village” there are museums, workshops and showrooms and every two years the “Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale”. The next edition is planned for the anniversary this summer.