Name: Why These $800 Scissors Make the Cut for Bespoke Tailors
Uploaded: 2026-01-13T17:00:00Z
Duration: 10 min 57 s
Description: Whiteley's and Ernest Wright's handmade tailoring shears are globally renowned for their sharpness and longevity, but the two rivals have faced troubles that left their coveted scissors hanging by a thread.

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Whiteley's and Ernest Wright's handmade tailoring shears are globally renowned for their sharpness and longevity, but the two rivals have faced troubles that left their coveted scissors hanging by a thread. Photo: George Downs/The Wall Street Journal

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260113/eb048448-74a0-45c9-9eee-9eb7bc450054/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Whiteley's and Ernest Wright's handmade tailoring shears are globally renowned for their sharpness and longevity, but the two rivals have faced troubles that left their coveted scissors hanging by a thread.

Why These $800 Scissors Make the Cut for Bespoke Tailors

Precision is key. We're making the best clothes ever. I think it's nice to have the best tools to make those.

Sometimes people start to laugh I can buy scissors that cut everywhere. Once you feel it, you know it. There is an upgrade in scissors.

It's guaranteed for life. You will never need another pair.

Every single detail is considered.

Gautam: Both Ernest Wright and William Whiteley are premium manufacturers of scissors and shears.

I've made tailor shears for Alexander McQueen, Ozwald Boateng, Paul Smith.

Gautam: The selling price ranges between 250 and $300.

600 pound. That's nothing for the work we put in.

Everything's done by hand on a pair of shears for Whiteley. You'll look round the supermarket, you'll see a pair hanging on the shelf for two quid. You think, "Oh! Bargain here." But they'll be broke in a month.

The history of the companies, you can feel it almost emotionally, rather than necessarily physically.

So our company originally formed in 1902.

Whiteley's can be traced back to 1760.

Both of these companies are just eight miles apart in Sheffield, England.

There's always rivalry with two different companies.

I've got views on their scissors, and I'm sure they've got views on our scissors as well.

Speaker: Now they've got an older generation of workers passing the skills forward to survive.

Never even thought about doing anything else but scissors.

Really, I've never thought about another career.

I live and breathe scissors now I do.

Good God.

As a cutter, the most important tool that I own are shears. I need a tool that's gonna cut through all manner of cloths, and do so in a way that is delicate. You don't wanna have to buy tool after tool after tool. It's just not cost effective. We don't get paid enough. First time I heard about Ernest Wright, I just knew I needed those shears.

A piece of what is probably the heaviest bit of denim that I've ever seen or felt in my life. The blades just glided straight through it, really, with ease.

I owned a pair of their ceremonial shears and they felt really special. Hadn't spent that much on a pair of shears before. They were 70 pounds. And I just knew that I'd invested in something special.

To have a company with this kind of legacy comes with a responsibility, but also with an enormous fan base in the world.

Oh, my word.

But it's not just Ernest Wright that has a cult following.

So these are my magic shears. This is my version of a wand in Harry Potter. And they're made by a company in England called William Whiteley and Sons.

I hope y'all are ready for a very bougie sewing product review.

So this is a pair of Whiteley shears. And it says Wilkinson down the side. And the reason for that is that Whiteley's acquired the Wilkinson brand way back in like the 1870s.

When I first started my apprenticeship, I got bought a pair of the Whiteley shears.

Owning a pair of proper shears is a rite of passage. My shears were handed to me. They're an old pair of Wilkinson's. They were 120 years old. It just felt magical because it was the perfect fit and in an industry where fit and balance is so important, it clicked. But you can use cheaper shears. The point is, pardon the pun, that you can cut right to the point.

I think that sharpness all the way to the point is what really differentiates these from cheaper scissors. Because instead of like two flat sheets of metal, there's a weird series of complex curves hidden in the blade.

I'll try to explain it.

This ticks over that way, or this blade kicks over that way.

You'll see that is like that.

It's gonna join like that.

They only touch on the point where it is sharp.

And that makes the cut very, very consistent, and very, very accurate.

Even if the blades are not sharp, but they are curved correctly, they will cut.

I know that there's a lot of work that's gone into making them. I'm only an expert in using them, not necessarily an expert in making them.

Okay, there were about 90 processes to make a pair of scissors.

It starts with buying the metal. There will be a bar that will be forged.

Speaker 1: The forging is currently being done in Europe, but both companies plan on trying to bring it back to Sheffield.

From a scissor blank, we would drill it.

If the hole is not straight, yeah, you can stop working on the pair.

Speaker 2: They then hand grind those curves into the blade.

You can't get the finish on a machine like you can with hand. 'Cause if it needs just tinkering that little bit, you're gonna have to change the whole setup of the machine. Where if I'm hand grinding it, I can just tinker away myself. Next step could be bow dressing. It's this bit here.

Speaker 3: Where your hand touches the metal, it should be as as smooth and flush as possible. It would then go off for hardening.

The harder the material, the sharper you can make your knife.

Andrew: Then after the first grind, they'll be put in our chemical rumblers. It finishes off what we've started to be fair, and gives us a fighting chance to get a really, really good finish on it.

Then there's a lot more grinding and sharpening and polishing, and then they're handed to someone called a putter.

Which is short for "putting the scissor togetherer."

I think one of the things that I find interesting is that recently this whole handmade process was left hanging by a thread.

Significant amounts of volume of cheaper quality scissors were being manufactured in Asia. That made work very, very difficult.

Speaker 4: There was still quite a lot being made in Sheffield still, but not like what it was in the heyday. And they couldn't compete with mass production in China and India and Pakistan.

In the race to the bottom, basically, quality was not always in the scissor business. But it was more about the quantity.

Certainly there was a period probably in the 1980s, when that dipped off below the high standards that we set ourselves.

But I think Ernest Wright had a particularly rough time of it. In the early 2010s, the company was on the brink of collapse. It was then taken over by Nick Wright, who's a member of the Wright family, and he launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2016 to try and rejuvenate the company.

At that time, Cliff and Eric, the two old putters, became ill. Nick Wright was not able to fulfill his pledge. It became a failure. And at the end of the story, he took his own life.

It was only towards when Paul Jacobs took over the company that they turned it round, and we've changed our business model from instead of being quantity, we're selling quality.

Both companies are now under new ownership. But I think one of the challenges they face is they have to get the knowledge of how to make these shears from an aging workforce before they retire.

If you want to keep this trade going, you've got to have people coming through from behind, just young lads trained up. The previous owners, they should have had a couple of apprentices in years ago, to carry it on. If I were to show somebody now how to start hand grinding, it would take them five years to learn it properly.

The information's not freely available. It's always been passed down from master to apprentice.

Victoria: Anything you can read in a book is not passing down skills. If you recite the A to Z of how to do something, that's not passing down skills.

But how do you get this knowledge and experience from the old guys into a younger generation? Because they just do it and then they say, "Did you see it?" But we don't know what to look at. We don't know what they were doing.

These shears are really complicated to make. But the older generation that have been working on them have been doing it for so long, it's like asking them to explain how they breathe. It's just second nature.

You drill them, you bore 'em, tap the bottom blade, and then straighten them down. Make sure they're nice and straight, and then you harden them, and that's virtually it.

If Eric and Cliff didn't come back to work, even if it was just for a few short years before they fully retired, the skills would've been lost.

It does seem like both companies now have enough apprentices to be able to carry this on.

I'm very confident that the skills that we have can be maintained going forward.

But to make sure that they're able to truly look after this craft for another generation, both rivals have now started, at least, to put the knives away.

There have been, I think from the old days, a lot of beef between Whiteley's and Ernest Wright.

A lot of rivalry happened because lots of designs were copied. That was not unusual back in the early 20th century.

But recently we have been in contact.

I'm very, very keen to see Ernest Wright succeed.

And it's good to know that we are both here.

We can save lots more companies, and retain their products into the future.

It's clear to me that these shears have been coveted by tailors for decades. But what's not clear to me is, as one generation passes the skills forward to the next generation, can that essence and the magic behind them be also carried along?

Yeah, the proof is in the pudding. I mean, when you're at this level of craftsmanship, ultimately you don't know until you are using these shears just how long they're gonna last. You can go and have however many within one order, and there might be one that's just slightly different. Because with a craft, it's made by hand. It's human.

Time will tell whether they're good quality, or whether they're not. I think that if this particular pair or a similar pair is still being used in 40, 50 years' time, I think that is what will tell.

The only thing to do is just get good workers and that you're fine, no problem. As long as you've got good workers, you can carry on.

If you want to make the best, you cannot rush it. You have to keep on doing it till it's okay.

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