Qualla: Fiskars, Finland

Fiskars, Finland: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danapit, CC BY-SA 3.0. Check your kitchen drawer. If the scissors in there have bright orange plastic handles, the name on the blade leads back to a bend in a small river in southern Finland, where in 1649 a merchant named Petter Thorwöste was granted the right to build a blast furnace and a forge. The village that grew up around that permission is still there, tucked into forest about eighty kilometres west of Helsinki, and fewer than a thousand people live in it. Iron left long ago. What replaced it is stranger and, in its way, more interesting.

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Image: Danapit | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fiskars, Finland: The Privilege of 1649

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit V-wolf, CC BY 3.0. Queen Kristina's grant gave Thorwöste the right to manufacture cast and forged iron products — everything, the privilege specified, except cannons. He built a wrought-iron hammer, a blast furnace and a smithy on the land of an old farm beside the Fiskars river, and the geography ...

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Image: V-wolf | CC BY 3.0

Fiskars, Finland: Von Julin's Century

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit adzq, CC BY 3.0. The works changed hands repeatedly and by 1802 the blast furnace had gone cold. Then in 1822 John Jacob von Julin bought both the ironworks and the village around it, and Fiskars became something closer to a laboratory. A foundry came first. Through the 1830s he added Finland's f...

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Image: adzq | CC BY 3.0

Fiskars, Finland: What the Wage Bought

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit adzq, CC BY 3.0. Company villages were bargains, and it is worth being clear about both halves. Fiskars owned the houses its workers slept in — the tenements along Bruksgatan, the row on Åkerraden, whose name means Field Row because each household got a strip of ground to grow food on. The compan...

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Image: adzq | CC BY 3.0

Fiskars, Finland: The Orange Handle

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abc10, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1967 the company put out a pair of scissors designed by Olof Bäckström, the first with moulded plastic handles rather than plain steel bows. Prototypes were made in black, red, green and orange, and after an internal vote at Fiskars, orange won — a colour now so tied to the br...

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Image: Abc10 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fiskars, Finland: The Village That Changed Its Spots

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pöllö, CC BY 3.0. By the 1990s the industry had moved on and the ironworks buildings were emptying. Rather than let them rot, a company vice-president went looking for artists, inviting creative professionals to take over the vacant workshops as studios. In 1996 they organised themselves into Onom...

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Image: Pöllö | CC BY 3.0