Artisan award for city's scissorsmiths

A scissor maker purported to be the oldest in the western world has won a prestigious artisan award for its 266-year commitment to "preserving an endangered craft".

Whiteley, which was founded in Sheffield in 1760, was awarded the gong at this year's Artisan Founder 2026 Business Awards, an event celebrating the skill and originality of independent businesses across the country.

Each pair of scissors is handcrafted at the city-centre workshop, and the firm counts designers such as Alexander McQueen and Paul Smith among its clients.

"Preserving this craft is about ensuring it has a future by passing our traditional skills to the next generation", said a spokesperson.

Whiteley took the Excellence in Craftsmanship gong at the Artisan Founder Awards.

Jade Wylde, the company's marketing manager, said the skills needed to make scissors were becoming "increasingly rare", joking that scissor craft was on the "red list".

She said: "Everything's become machine manufactured, mostly in China, so things come through extremely cheap and extremely low quality.

"People replace them quickly because you can buy them so cheap, whereas ours are made by hand by real people, who are putting all those skills from many generations into each pair."

The company's master craftsman and "putterer togetherer" Andrew Colton hand-assembled and tuned tailoring shears for the late designer McQueen.

Colton has been working at Whiteley for more than 50 years and started out helping to screw scissors together during his school holidays.

He is now one of the "last few people" who can do traditional hand-grinding and scissor craft "is in his bloodline", said Wylde.

As well as large fabric scissors, Wylde said Whiteley made scissors all the way down to "golf trimmers" used by greenkeepers to tidy stray blades of grass.

Company director Gautam Bathija said: "We're incredibly proud to continue making scissors in Sheffield and playing our part in preserving one of the city's great manufacturing traditions."

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