A craft wholesaler before it was a machine brand.

Cricut’s company is older than its machines. In the draft registration statement it filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its 2021 listing, Cricut says it was originally incorporated under the laws of the State of Utah in June 1969 as Provo Craft & Novelty, Inc., and that it changed its name to Cricut, Inc. in March 2018. The new name simply adopted the brand that had by then become the business.

The Deseret News, profiling the company in June 2007, traced Provo Craft further back, to a retail craft store in 1963, and described it as a Spanish Fork-based manufacturer and wholesaler of craft and hobby products that still ran retail stores. The paper said Robert Workman, then the company’s chief executive creative officer, had later bought the business from his parents, and that about a dozen years earlier its executives had decided to take on the risk of manufacturing their own products rather than only selling other people’s. The SEC filing and the newspaper therefore give two different starting points: the 1963 shop and the 1969 incorporation.

The product that changed the company was the Cricut Personal Electronic Cutter. English Wikipedia’s model table dates the original Cricut, with its six-by-twelve-inch cutting mat, to January 2005, and the larger Cricut Expression to November 2005. The Deseret News reported in 2007 that the cutter had made 2006 a record year for the company. These early machines looked like small desktop printers and worked from plug-in cartridges of shapes and fonts, each with its own keyboard overlay; English Wikipedia notes licensing agreements that put characters from Disney, Pixar, Nickelodeon, Sesame Street, DC Comics and Hello Kitty on cartridges.

The idea reached a wider audience quickly. In December 2009 The New York Times wrote about electronic cutters under the headline “For Crafters, the Gift of Automation”, and Wired observed in 2012 that the Cricut resembled a desktop printer.

From cartridges to an app, and onto Nasdaq.

The next shift was software. English Wikipedia says the company’s early Cricut DesignStudio program, released in November 2005, could combine and stretch cartridge images but could not create arbitrary designs, and that the later Cricut Craft Room worked in a similar way. In 2018 Cricut announced on its own blog that Craft Room, which relied on Adobe Flash, would close on 15 July 2018; from then on the web-based Design Space was the official way to send work to a Cricut machine, letting users draw, combine library images or upload their own files.

The hardware changed with it. English Wikipedia dates the Cricut Explore family to 2014 and the Cricut Maker to August 2017, followed by the compact Cricut Joy in March 2020 and the wide-format Cricut Venture in July 2023. Cricut’s blog announced the Explore 4 and Maker 4 in February 2025 and the Joy 2 and Explore 5 in February 2026. Alongside the cutters, Cricut moved into heat transfer with the handheld Cricut EasyPress in 2017, its help centre says, and later added mug and hat presses; in January 2022 its blog introduced the Bright 360 craft lamp.

Cricut became a public company in 2021, listing its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker CRCT. Its filings name entities affiliated with Petrus P.C. LLC as holding significant influence over the company, and English Wikipedia lists Ashish Arora as its president and chief executive. The 2025 annual report gives the principal executive offices as South Jordan, Utah.

The software model has also drawn attention. On 12 March 2021 Cricut announced that users without a Cricut Access subscription would be limited to a set number of uploads a month to Design Space; after objections from users, reported by The Verge and Ars Technica, the company dropped the plan within the week, The Verge reported on 18 March 2021.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group all make tools and supplies for paper crafts: cutting machines, steel and etched dies, embossing folders, stamps, inks and adhesives. Paper-craft and die-cutting brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family businesses that began at a kitchen table or a trade-show booth to names that now belong to larger craft or office groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a specialist craft shop to a general-merchandise aisle.

A paper-craft brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single machine or die than by a name, a system of compatible parts and the projects it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its headquarters or its production, or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tools are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging and machines have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A machine, an app and a materials shelf.

Cricut now presents itself as more than a machine. On its own website the company says that “our dream has been to help people lead creative lives”, and its 2025 annual report refers to the paid subscribers of its Cricut Access service and to the Design Space app alongside its machines. The marks it lists there include Cricut Access, Cricut EasyPress, Cricut Explore, Cricut Maker, Design Space and Cricut MugPress.

The machines are used on paper and cardstock, vinyl, iron-on transfer, felt and fabric, and, on the larger models, on leather, matboard and thin wood, English Wikipedia notes. Cricut says in its filings that it designs its own products and develops its own design apps, while relying on outside factories to build them: its 2025 annual report says it outsources manufacturing to third-party contract manufacturers located primarily in Malaysia, China, Thailand and South Korea.

The brand’s look has followed the business. The early machines came with printed keyboard overlays for each cartridge; the current range is organised under the product names Explore, Maker, Joy and Venture, with Design Space as the common screen between them. Cricut publishes no colour codes or typeface names for its identity in the sources used for this guide, so the colours here are our own.

For a design guide, Cricut shows how a family craft wholesaler from Utah turned a single product into its corporate name, and how a hardware brand came to be defined as much by its software as by its machines. Compare Silhouette America, the Utah cutting-machine brand of Japan’s Graphtec, and Fiskars, the Finnish maker of hand-held craft scissors. For this guide we use cutting-mat green, vinyl yellow and cardstock cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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