Jonas Forth's surprising facts about Finnish design

While tooling around the Interwebs the other day, I ran across a list called 20 Surprising Facts about Finnish Design Icons, written by Jonas Forth. To be more accurate, there are 24 surprising facts, because Jonas was apparently feeling generous the day he compiled the list.

I'm only going to tease you with a few of them, because I want you to go to his site and let him tell the rest of the stories.

From jonasforth.com


The iconic Fiskars scissors by Olof Bäckström were meant to be red, green or black but due to the production manager using what was left in the moulding machine from making plastic juice pressers, some of them turned out orange. They took a vote and orange won 9-7.

The metal holder that surrounds the glass in Timo Sarpaneva’s Tsaikka series was made from recycled zipper waste. His brother Pentti, who made jewellery, experimented with similar ideas.

The best way to identify a real Aalto 60 stool is by how the screws are attached to the bottom of the base. They’ve basically been made the same way since 1933.