When you think of Nordic design for the masses with a global reach, most people probably think of Swedish Ikea. Right now, however, the main season for another brand is in full swing, which even the Czechs are taking by storm with the onset of spring. Finnish Fiskars, which became famous for its scissors, spades, axes and dozens of other tools.
Fiskars produces tools with unprecedented durability, has an exceptionally long history, and its scope extends from hoes to hand-painted porcelain. It’s not a surname or an acronym like in the case of the furniture giant Ikea. Fiskars is a small village in the south of Finland, about a hundred kilometers west of Helsinki.
Almost 400 years ago, in the middle of lakes and forests, the story of a company began to be born, which today has almost six thousand employees, branches in a hundred countries around the world and annual sales reaching thirty billion crowns. Last year, the Fiskars group achieved its second best profit in history with 2.6 billion crowns.
In the beginning there was only a forge and one small village. It all started in 1649, when the merchant Peter Thorwöste received permission from Queen Christina of Sweden to set up a blast furnace and workshop in the village of Fiskars. Condition? He is not allowed to make weapons. And so he set about something practical, with which the company has remained to this day: the hoe.
It didn’t just stay with them, the range of the young company expanded and changed over the next years and century as iron was replaced as the main material by copper and then steel again. The owners of the company also changed. A key change occurred in the first half of the 19th century, when the iron works in Fiskars were bought by pharmacist Johan Jacob Julin from Turku.
A few years later, they were the first in Finland to start producing cutlery, but also scissors, which a century later and a few years later became a turning point for the company’s business. At the end of the 19th century, Fiskars became a company that had a major impact on Finnish industry and agriculture.
Steam engines and especially plows were produced here, and the name of the small village became synonymous with high quality and reliability. The strong business is also evidenced by the fact that already in 1915 this company entered the Helsinki Stock Exchange.
However, the key moment in the history of Fiskars came later. In 1967, they brought to the world an invention that won them customers all over the world. Those expecting rocket science may be disappointed. They were scissors.
Yes, scissors for regular cutting. By 2010 alone, over a billion units were sold. Of course, scissors existed before and were made all over the place, but until then they were all made of metal. That’s why they were heavy and also expensive. At Fiskars, they thought that the handles, designed to fit the hand as well as possible and to be controlled well, will be made of plastic.
And since the factory just had orange plastic left over from the production of the juicer, that was the one used to cast the prototypes of the first scissors. Although it was just a fluke—black, green, or red were originally considered—in the end, orange won, beating black by two votes in an internal staff vote.
And the brand soon earned an international trademark for its orange scissors. Ten years after the “invention” of semi-plastic scissors, which suddenly became a commonly available product for the general public thanks to their lower price, the management of Fiskars decided to expand to the USA and built its own factory for these scissors there.
This was the beginning of the great international expansion and growth of the company, which by the way today has several different types of scissors on offer – but the original model from 1967 still holds the most importance.
By the way, even today, the scissors leave the factory only after professional “listeners” have tested them to see if they make their characteristic sound when cutting.
Similar to these now iconic scissors, several other products from the Fiskars workshop have received prestigious design awards. Among them, for example, the most recent dots of beauty aka the Best of the Best Red Dot Design award, which was earned by the cooking range and axes.
“The Fiskars DNA, which is rooted in Nordic design, permeates all our products and has a clear resonance with people. We often look to our archives for inspiration, and given our nearly 375-year history, we find in them an abundance of timeless design innovations that are still relevant today,” commented Petteri Masalin, Fiskars Brand Design Director, on the award.
But Fiskars is not just a brand. The same belongs to the group of the same name, which includes a number of other, mainly Scandinavian brands. Among them are, for example, the manufacturer of hand-painted porcelain tableware Royal Copenhagen, which was founded by the Danish royal family in the 17th century, or the glass company Iittala – it has in its portfolio, for example, a legendary vase by the architect and designer Alvar Alt.
The group also includes brands of crystal and porcelain tableware such as Irish Waterford or British Wedgwood. By the way, this brand, which is known mainly among gardeners, made it to the pages of Vogue magazine a few years ago. She introduced gender-neutral gardening clothing.
Although it did not become mainstream, hoes, spades or axes with a typically black-orange color are the basis of their spring equipment for many people today.
2023-04-29 10:37:55
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