Ernest Wright is a traditional scissors-making company in Sheffield, celebrated for its devotion to handcraft and the revival of heritage patterns of scissors and shears. Each pair is handmade in the company’s city-centre workshop, where stone-grinding wheels hum, hammers ring, and craftspeople known as putters work by eye and instinct to bring every blade into perfect tension. The firm’s enduring motto, ‘Every pair a jewel’, is printed onto every presentation box.
The Wrights were a Sheffield scissors-making dynasty. Ernest Wright Sr. established the business in 1902, and its reputation grew over several generations. By the 1970s, the workshop employed more than eighty people — but global competition and mass manufacturing gradually eroded the local trade.
In 2018, the company was rescued from administration by two craft enthusiasts determined to preserve Sheffield’s endangered scissors-making skills. They worked with master putters Cliff Denton and Eric Stones — both then in their seventies — who passed on decades of hard-won knowledge to a new generation of makers.
Today, Ernest Wright’s growing team continues to restore and re-issue classic Sheffield patterns, from the Turton Kitchen Scissors and the 13-inch Heritage Tailor Shears to the General Purpose, Quilting, and Kutrite flat kitchen scissors — each built to last a lifetime.
In 2020, Ernest Wright received the Heritage Crafts Association President’s Award for Endangered Crafts, recognising its work to keep this rare skill alive. The following year, the firm secured the future of scissors-making in Sheffield by purchasing its historic premises, Kutrite Works. In 2025, the workshop was honoured by a visit from Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Gloucester, marking a proud new chapter in the living story of Sheffield’s last working scissor-maker.
