Throwback Thursday: Centuries-Old Fiskars Named Red Dot Design Team of 2020
by:
June 11, 2020
How does a company founded in 1649 become the Red Dot: Design Team of the Year? It’s partly because of a pair of scissors that you probably have in a drawer at your home or office (I do).
Finland’s Fiskars manufactured the world’s first scissors with a plastic handle in 1967. The iconic product with the signature orange handle went on to become a worldwide phenomenon, with more than one billion (and counting) sold, according to the company. Now a manufacturer of an array of gardening, cooking and building tools, the company has continued to foster innovative design rooted in ergonomics, simplicity, and “onnellisuus,” the Finnish word for happiness, which is why it is being honored this year by Red Dot.
Red Dot hosts an annual international design competition, in which a jury of experts recognizes excellence in product design, communication design, and design concepts from among thousands of entries. This year’s winners will be featured during Red Dot Design Week from June 22 to 26, as will the Fiskars Design Team headed by Petteri Masalin. They will also be celebrated at the Red Dot Design Museum in Essen, Germany, where Red Dot has its headquarters. Fiskars has been a frequent recipient of Red Dot product design awards over the years.
“It was 30 years ago that Fiskars won its first distinction in the Red Dot Award: Product Design,” said Professor Dr. Peter Zec, founder and CEO of the Red Dot Award. “Ever since, the company’s products have been winning over not just our jury but also myself. The design team’s creations are characterized by their ergonomic and user-friendly nature. The technological innovations and groundbreaking combinations of materials together with the understated matter-of-factness make these products really quite special,” said Zec in a prepared statement.
A colorful origin story
So, how did we get here? Fiskars started as an ironworks in the village of the same name in 1649. It had its ups and downs, surviving economic upheavals and global conflicts over the centuries. In 1967, it introduced the now iconic scissors. “The combination of plastic and metal created light, precision scissors with an ergonomic plastic handle in bright orange. The product was designed by Olof Bäckström and quickly became a hallmark of the Fiskars brand,” notes the company on its website. The company had the cutting technology down pat — what made this product unique and so successful was the plastic handle.
“Most of the scissors available in 1967 — when Bäckström made his design breakthrough — were the heavy iron variety used by tailors,” writes Oscar Holland in CNN Style. "Tailors' scissors were horrendously expensive, so Fiskars took the shape and cast it in a cheap material — plastic," Pekka Korvenmaa, a professor of design and culture at Finland's Aalto University, told Holland. Plastic made the scissors lighter and also allowed Bäckström to refine a curved design that made them easier to hold. “Rather than being forged from iron, the blades were made from pressed steel which was held together by a single piece of metal in the middle. The whole production process became quite simple and inexpensive,” added Korvenmaa.
As for the signature color of the handle, that was, in fact, a happy accident. "When the first samples were being produced, there were supposed to be three options — black, green and red," Marika Orkamo, Fiskars' Vice President of branding and marketing, told CNN. "But the guy who mixed the plastic had just made an orange-colored juicer, and he had some leftovers in the machine.
"He wanted to use orange first so that they didn't waste any plastic. When [Fiskars' employees] were presented with the four final choices, they had a vote, and orange beat black by nine votes to seven," writes CNN.
The company also produces scissors with red handles to indicate left-handed models, but orange is indelibly connected with the brand, which made it official in this century: The color “Fiskars Orange” became a registered trademark in Finland in 2003 and in the United States in 2007.