A die-cutter built for teachers.

Sizzix grew out of a classroom chore. In its own history of the brand, published in July 2026, Sizzix says that in the 1970s LaDorna Eichenberg, an elementary-school art teacher in California and a mother of three, heard her fellow teachers complain about cutting out letters and shapes by hand, one at a time. Her idea, the company says, was a cross between a cookie cutter and a pull-down paper cutter. She talked it through with her husband, Robert Eichenberg, an engineer, who worked on the design until it became the first Ellison Letter Machine.

The Orange County Business Journal told the couple’s story in September 2005. It reported that LaDorna Ellison Eichenberg had graduated from Brigham Young University and gained her teaching credential, that she met Robert in a creative-writing class at the University of California, Irvine, and that in 1977 the Eichenbergs started Ellison, then based in Lake Forest, California, as a maker of arts and crafts supplies for schools.

The early business was small. Sizzix says LaDorna drew the first dies herself, drawing on her art training and her classroom experience: Christmas and Easter shapes, and squares for the school calendars teachers made. The couple put their savings into the venture, found an outside company to make the parts and assembled machines in their two-bedroom apartment. They lent machines to schools to try, the company says, and schools did not want to give them back.

Trade shows were slow at first. Sizzix recalls that LaDorna cut out a six-foot figure of a woman holding scissors, with the line “are you tired of cutting letters?”, and that the stand began to draw teachers from then on. The company says it moved into its first building in 1978 and bought its first laser machines in 1984 to make dies more consistently.

From schools to the craft room.

For two decades Ellison sold mainly to schools, under what the company calls the Ellison Education brand. Then, Sizzix says, with the founders’ children and grandchildren working in the business, the family saw demand for a smaller die-cutting system that people could use at home, and in 2001 the Sizzix brand was born. English Wikipedia describes the Sizzix range as an evolution of the Ellison LetterMachine of 1977, and lists steel-rule dies, chemically etched dies and embossing folders alongside the machines. Crafters use them, it says, to cut paper, fabric and other thin materials for scrapbooking, card making, quilting and home décor.

The name has a story of its own. Sizzix says the family were driving along Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas when they passed a road called Zzyzx, a name chosen, it says, to be the last word in the English language. It stuck with them, and the company adds that the sound of the new name, close to “scissors”, was a happy coincidence for a tool designed to replace them.

The family stayed in charge. The Orange County Business Journal reported in 2005 that the Eichenbergs had retired but remained co-chairs, that LaDorna’s daughter Lisa Corcoran ran the privately held company, and that Corcoran’s daughter, Kristin Highberg, then director of corporate business relations and sales, was expected to succeed her as a third generation. The same article said that Ellison had begun making die cutters in China with a manufacturer there a few years earlier, and by then had its own plant in the country.

Today Sizzix lists its customer service in Irvine, California, and its British site names Ellison Europe in Wrexham, Wales. Both the American and British Sizzix sites carry an Ellison copyright line, and the two brands still sit side by side on the company’s websites.

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.

Machines, dies and designers.

Most people meet Sizzix through its machines. On its website the brand groups its range around the Big Shot family, including the Big Shot Plus and the Big Shot Switch, and in September 2025 it introduced a new version of the Big Shot itself. Sizzix says the range now runs from compact machines to wider ones, with electric, foldable and starter-kit options, and that in recent years it has moved beyond die-cutting into tools and other making essentials.

Much of the catalogue carries a designer’s name. The Sizzix website sorts its dies, embossing folders and stencils by designer, with collections from Tim Holtz, Vicki Boutin, Seth Apter and Eileen Hull among others, and by occasion, from Christmas to Valentine’s Day. Its blog announced new designers joining the line through 2025 and 2026.

In October 2024, the company says, Ellison added Sizzix Studio, a separate brand aimed at creatives of all skill levels, with its own tools, stencils and stamps and its own licensed artists. The Ellison Education shop for schools remains linked from the same site, so the classroom business that started it all still sits beside the craft brand.

For a design guide, Sizzix shows how a tool made for teachers became a consumer brand with a playful invented name, while the family company behind it kept its own name for the schools market. Compare Fiskars, the Finnish scissors and craft-tools brand, and Cricut, the electronic cutting-machine brand from Utah. For this guide we use die-cut plum, card-stock marigold and paper cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sizzix’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.