The orange is still there after the packaging has gone. It surrounds the fingers, moves with the blades and returns to the drawer with the tool. In Fiskars’ familiar scissors, colour belongs to the part someone holds.
That makes the object more interesting than a bright product on a shop shelf. Its history joins three changes that are easy to collapse into one: how scissors were made, how their handles were formed, and which colour those handles became.
The colour story has a memorable accident in it. The scissors themselves needed rather more than an accident.
An old tool meets a new material
The Fiskars Museum’s account of the 1960s places the scissors within a wider move into plastics. The company was also making such products as household appliances and plastic containers. A material associated with the new handles was already part of its manufacturing world.
The museum describes scissors made largely by hand before the early 1960s, followed by changes to their production. Plastic handles were one part of that change. It dates the start of orange-scissor production at the Cutlery Mill to 1967.
This is a useful starting point because it keeps the colour in proportion. The task was not simply to paint an established object orange. Changing the handle material altered the relationship between the metal cutting parts and the shapes that a hand would grip.
A handle has to be present whenever the scissors are used. Unlike a box or a paper label, it is not a temporary surface around the purchase. Giving that component a consistent appearance makes the identity part of the working object.
The designer and the dates
The Museum of Modern Art’s collection record credits Olof Backstrom and identifies plastic and stainless steel as the materials. Its dating is unusually helpful: “Designed 1960–1967, this example 1976.”
Those dates describe different things. The design period is not the manufacture date of every surviving pair. Nor is an example in a museum necessarily the first product off a production line.
Fiskars’ 2006 annual report, in its scissors anniversary feature, credits Olof Bäckström and connects the 1967 product with plastic handles and a changed manufacturing process. The company’s account and the museum’s object record therefore answer related questions without supplying one interchangeable date.
The photograph used here is later again: Evan-Amos photographed a pair of Fiskars scissors in 2010. It shows the familiar relationship between orange handles and metal blades. It is not evidence of what a particular 1967 sample looked like.
Orange entered as a sample
The same annual report tells the colour story as a recollection. A machinist making colour samples had orange material left from a previous job and used it to make a pair of handles. Employees then voted on the colours, and orange won.
The company repeats the decision in its January 2024 corporate history. That account names black, red, green and orange prototypes and says orange and black were the most popular before an internal vote.
These are company accounts of the choice. Repetition in two company publications is not an independent observation of the factory event. The records also do not establish that every buyer preferred orange, or that a particular colour produces a universal response.
What they describe is still a revealing sequence. An available material put an option in front of people. A decision kept it. The chance appearance of a sample and the deliberate adoption of that sample are separate moments.
Calling the colour accidental can obscure the second moment. A colour left in a machine does not, on its own, decide what a company will continue to manufacture.
The story does not end at the vote
The museum’s manufacturing history continues beyond the launch. It records a new scissors factory at Billnäs in 1972. Fiskars’ own heritage timeline then dates a United States factory to 1977.
Those developments put the small colour anecdote inside a larger industrial story. Choosing a sample was not the same task as producing a useful tool repeatedly, supplying it to another market or developing later versions.
The anniversary report itself describes continuing changes and credits later design work to Olavi Lindén. It does not present the object as a finished idea that remained technically untouched from its first appearance.
That distinction matters when a product looks familiar for a long time. A recognisable feature can continue while other details develop. Familiarity alone cannot tell someone which generation, factory, material specification or cutting task a particular pair belongs to.
A colour that stays with the action
There is an ordinary reason the handles make such a strong image. They frame the hand’s contact with the tool. The blades can be partly hidden by paper or fabric while the orange remains visible.
That is an interpretation of the object’s layout, rather than a measured claim about attention or sales. It also does not mean colour can substitute for the cutting parts. Recognition and usefulness have different jobs.
The scissors bring them together in one component. The handle is a place for fingers, a shape to make, a material choice and a visible identifying feature. Looking only at the colour misses the tool. Looking only at the cutting mechanism misses part of the object’s public identity.
The most satisfying version of this history therefore keeps both the accident and the work. Orange may have entered the company’s story as material left in a machine. It endured as part of a manufactured thing that people could pick up and use.
The box could go. The orange stayed with the scissors.
Sources and image
The linked Fiskars Museum history, MoMA object record and dated Fiskars publications support the chronology. Company recollections remain attributed; no precise sales effect, universal colour psychology or present legal claim about colour ownership is made. The photograph is Evan-Amos’ 2010 public-domain image of later Fiskars scissors, resized with the complete tool retained. No cutting test or customer experience was performed for this article.