One tool to cut, emboss and stencil.

Spellbinders began with a crafter’s wish list. On its own website in 2011, the company told its story this way: Stacey Caron, a scrapbooking and craft enthusiast, saw the need for a single die-cutting system that could stand in for several existing tools, one that would work with other makers’ products, cut and emboss, travel easily and last. Her husband, Jeff Caron, supplied what the company called the “creative ingenuity”, and the result was the Wizard Universal Craft Tool, together with the company’s patented die templates for cutting, embossing and stenciling. That page named Jeff Caron as chief executive and Stacey Caron as president, both described as co-creators of the system, and called Spellbinders a family-run company.

The same page dated the start to 2003. Spellbinders Paper Arts, it said, entered the craft and hobby market that year, and its timeline records that in August 2003 the company sought patent protection for its die templates. In February 2004, the timeline continues, the Wizard made its debut at the Hobby Industry Association trade show in Dallas, Texas, alongside a die collection called Geometrics, which the company later described as the forerunner of its signature line.

The company did not start in Arizona. According to that 2011 timeline, in January 2005 Spellbinders moved its headquarters from Cleveland, Ohio, to Phoenix, Arizona, and introduced a redesigned Wizard at the same time. Phoenix has remained its base: the company’s current website calls it Spellbinders Paper Arts, and its listing as an exhibitor at Messe Frankfurt’s Creativeworld trade fair gives Spellbinders Paper Arts Company LLC an address in Phoenix.

From the Wizard to Nestabilities.

The company’s early years, as its 2011 timeline sets them out, were a run of product launches. In June 2006 it was granted patent protection for its die technology for cutting, embossing and stenciling, and in 2006 it registered the Wizard and Spellbinders names as trademarks. The same year, the timeline says, it began distributing in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany, and Canadian distribution followed in 2007, the year it also redesigned the packaging of its die templates.

The line that came to define the brand arrived in July 2007. That month, the company says, it launched Nestabilities, sets of plain and scalloped circles, ovals, squares and rectangles cut in matching shapes at incremental sizes, so that one shape sits neatly inside the next, and it introduced Shapeabilities, free-form shaped dies that could cut or emboss in the middle of a card. The “-abilities” naming ran through the catalogue of the time, from Edgeabilities window dies to Borderabilities, which the company said came in a 12-inch size for scrapbook pages and a 5½-inch size for cards.

Machines followed the dies. The timeline records that in July 2008 the company launched a new raspberry-coloured Wizard, that in January 2010 it debuted the Presto Punch, an automatic punching and embossing machine, and that in July 2010 it introduced the Grand Calibur, a large-format die-cutting and embossing machine that takes letter-size paper. It had previewed a motorised machine, the Xcalibur, and started a members’ programme, Club Spellbinders, in February 2008.

The newer lines move beyond cutting. Spellbinders’ current About page says it went on to develop the Glimmer Hot Foil system for adding foil to cards, and that in 2023 it launched the BetterPress Letterpress System, which it presents as a way for makers to print letterpress-style projects at home. Its website now sorts its range into etched dies, press and foil, BetterPress, embossing folders, stencils, stamps and wax seals, with collections credited by name to the designers who draw them.

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.

Two brands, one warehouse.

In November 2024 Spellbinders bought a second name. An announcement dated 1 November 2024, published on both companies’ websites, said that Spellbinders Paper Arts had acquired Hero Arts, a family-owned maker of stamps, inks and accessories. It quoted Marc Petrine as president of Spellbinders Paper Arts, and Hero Arts’ co-owners, the husband-and-wife team Aaron Leventhal and Laura Ackerman, who were selling the business. The two companies said Hero Arts would keep its own style and its own printed catalogue rather than being folded into Spellbinders, and that Leventhal and Ackerman would stay on as ambassadors rather than run it day to day.

The same announcement set out where the work would happen. Hero Arts stock, it said, was being moved from the company’s facility in Richmond, California, to the Spellbinders warehouse in Phoenix, Arizona, from which all Hero Arts orders would ship after 1 November, while the Richmond facility would carry on making red rubber and wood-mounted stamps for the foreseeable future. In December 2024 Hero Arts announced that Heather Meeson had become its creative director, in a notice that quoted Nicole Westervelt as vice president of sales and marketing for Spellbinders + Hero Arts. The two shops now link to each other at the top of their websites.

Spellbinders still works with outside names. In October 2026 it announced a collaboration with Peanuts, with a first winter and holiday collection of stamps, dies, press and foil plates and rub-ons due in December 2026, and a few weeks earlier it announced a felt collection with the textile designer Anne Oliver of Lolli & Grace.

For a design guide, Spellbinders shows how a small family business built a brand language out of product names, nesting its shapes and its “-abilities” lines into a recognisable system before adding foil, letterpress and a second brand of its own. Compare Fiskars, the Finnish maker of craft scissors, and Sizzix, another die-cutting brand. For this guide we use raspberry, foil gold and cardstock cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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