William Whiteley & Sons, a well-known scissor company in England, sure knows their stuff when it comes to cutting instruments. They’ve been around for 257 years; combining traditional handcrafting with current world technologies to make scissors capable of cutting through Kevlar (just take a look at their manufacturing process in the video below).

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Different scissors have different uses but are all made from the same hand-forged steel which undergoes 39 treatment and finishing processes.

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Their newest line of scissors, titled “EXO”, are supposed to combine “a quarter of a millennium’s scissor making knowledge with the latest in advanced tooling and coatings” – meaning, they’ll cut through just about anything while feeling good and looking sharp (literally). Material-wise, stainless steel, black Teflon, and gold ceramic round out the lineup.

Taking inspiration from Thomas Wilkinson (a scissors maker whose company William Whiteley & Sons bought out in 1879), the EXOs use stainless steel for the blades and handles, albeit with a different fixing and blade attachment process. The handles themselves require nothing except some casting and a shot blast to polish the metal.

If you’re wondering why a two-century-old company needs help on Kickstarter, it’s because handcrafting each pair of scissors to meet demand is a daunting task. Imagine having to make 100,000 copies of a document without a printer, then complicate the task by a hundred – it would still be nowhere near how difficult it is to replicate thousands of scissors.

The EXO project will launch soon on Kickstarter—we’ll be sure to let you know when it’s up!

Author

Carlos wrestles gators, and by gators, we mean words. He also loves good design, good books, and good coffee.