Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. A couple of hundred have contributed since 2009 on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Maggie Fox, a former marketing and operations executive who has spent most of her career in technology and software, often in ground-breaking spaces. She's also a two-time startup CEO who is passionate about small, sustainable family businesses and heritage crafts. Introducing consumers to the concept of "luxury scissors" (your scissors should be as good as your knives!) under the Ciselier e-commerce brand is a natural culmination of her years in digital and social media marketing, love for brand-building, collaboration and exploration. Maggie’s passion is to help celebrate Ciselier's traditional scissor makers and help them find new markets globally:
Have you ever stared for a while at a humble scissor? I mean, really considered it? When I was growing up, we had (what seemed at the time) a massive pair of old black-handled carbon steel shears. They lurked in the junk drawer, always at the ready to help in opening packaging, wrapping gifts or making crafts. My mother still has them; they’re called “the good scissors”.
They are a tool from another time – hot-forged and oil-hardened, not even in the same category as the scissors most people have today, which are cheap, plastic-handled and cold stamped. You can’t sharpen these mass-produced scissors, and when they dull or break, they’re thrown away. They’re literally garbage.
But how did that shift happen? And can you still buy really good scissors, serious tools made by skilled craftspeople?
This is a question I’d idly asked myself a few years ago. It was entirely random, and yet it stuck with me in a strangely persistent way. Until one day I decided I needed to know the answer.
If there’s one thread I can draw through my life, it’s exploration. I’ve taken on every new twist or turn based on one thing, “Well, that sounds like fun!” One person’s fun might be another’s torture, so a definition is probably helpful: if it’s never been done, no one can figure out how (or they tell you it’s “impossible”), I want to do it.
From my “first career” as a television writer and producer to starting Social Media Group (the world’s first social media consulting firm) in 2006, to joining the Senior Executive Team at SAP as head of digital marketing, I have always been drawn to technology, innovation and transformation. Most recently, that’s been at Smile.io, an ecommerce loyalty software platform in the Shopify ecosystem, where I sat on the board and spent a year running the business.
In August 2021, I decided I was ready to launch a startup again. I came up with a list of ideas, white spaces where I thought there could be opportunity for creativity and growth – for making something new, much like Social Media Group. Research and exploration narrowed the list, until I came to that very small question mentioned earlier: “Where can you buy really good scissors?” I thought I’d see if I could find out.
I was shocked to discover what felt like a secret: there are a small handful of heritage makers producing amazing scissors - as good as the best knives. Often in regions known for swords, many of these firms have been making household blades for centuries. But they are dwindling – fast. In Solingen, Premana, France, Spain… makers were practicing their craft in the traditional way, but their scissors were not making their way to global markets. These companies were closing, one by one.
Here's one of the artisans in Italy
I became instantly obsessed. High-quality household scissors did not exist as a consumer category, and there was virtually no content available on the history or making of scissors available online. I started looking for more makers, turning to export manifests and other documents in the public domain to track down company names and contact information. It was like a treasure hunt, and I began ordering samples. Google Translate was my very good friend.
By the fall, gorgeous scissors in hand – unlike anything I had even owned - I knew I was on to something really, really fun. So, of course I obviously (?) decided to start an e-commerce company, importing only the finest handmade scissors, with the tiny goal of creating awareness about this dying craft and hopefully saving the industry from oblivion. Ciselier (French for “Scissor Maker”) was born.
For the first time in a long time, Ciselier has given me the chance to make something net new from end to end: product selection, branding and positioning, packaging, systems and processes. After years of training myself to delegate to people far smarter than myself, it’s been an education and a re-education in marketing. And e-commerce software, metal forging, supply chain logistics, copywriting, packaging design, vendor management, importing… the list is overwhelming when I look back at it). Not to mention the rush of founding a company with a mission to help our heritage makers (who craft such beautiful scissors). They’re under huge economic pressure from low-cost, low-quality products; it’s truly an industry that could be gone before most people even hear about it, which would be a terrible loss.
I’m still obsessed with technology, but this time it’s very, very old technology! Scissors are a tool that are used almost universally; everyone has a pair. Our point is that your scissors can - and should be - as good as your knives. It takes up to five years of apprenticeship to learn how to assemble a pair of high-quality scissors, and the number of people who can do so is fewer than 100 globally. Everyone instantly appreciates the difference when they handle a pair of hot-forged, hand-assembled scissors, but sadly, most of us never get the chance.
We decided to keep our focus narrow, on just four categories of scissors: kitchen, embroidery, paper/craft, and left-handed use. Kitchen are by far the most popular. We find that anyone who appreciates a fine knife or cooks with any serious intention immediately falls in love. Scissors are an incredibly efficient kitchen tool, but not as commonly used in North America as abroad. To that end, we've started publishing a video series about uses for kitchen scissors. Truly - once you have a pair, you simply cannot go back. Similarly, our other categories offer the finest quality tools specific to the tasks at hand: tiny, deadly-sharp embroidery snips, powerful slicing fabric shears and a great selection for lefties. Here are the Pallarès Primera Everyday Kitchen scissors, made in Solsona, Spain:
Ciselier was founded to raise awareness of the world’s heritage scissor manufacturers and make it easier for quality-minded consumers to find them. We had the great good fortune to visit our heritage makers last year, and we plan to make another trip this coming May. We’ve had incredible uptake and coverage in the media, and now we’re more concerned about our supply than demand. At the moment we sell only within North America, but we’ll eventually expand to Europe.
We're extremely active on Instagram as well as Twitter and in order to fill the huge void of information about scissors (there are literally only three books available in English on the topic, and they are extremely slim) we have also been doing a lot of research and conducting interviews with makers, publishing articles on our blog and via our email newsletter. We've been building up a good library of information, but there's much more to document.
It's been an incredibly fun startup to build – creative, innovative, challenging and meaningful. When I tell my acquaintances in the technology space what my new company does, they often give me an odd look. They must think I’ve lost it or wonder what the software angle is. But then I show them a pair of hand-assembled, hot-forged and oil-hardened stainless steel kitchen scissors… and that look instantly disappears.
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