Meet the Scissorsmith — Matt Grumley

Founded in 2007. Built on 35+ Years Behind the Chair.

ShearGenius is the only Australian hairdressing scissor brand founded and still personally run by a working Hairdresser, Scissorsmith, Designer and Educator. Matt Grumley has been sharpening scissors, training stylists and cutting hair for more than 35 years — and he has been designing and selling his own scissors since 2007. That is 19 years as an independent brand, not a rebadged import line. Our closest competitors are marketers who bought their scissor brands from the previous owners within the last seven years. There is no middleman. There is no marketing department. There is just Matt.

The Only Hairdresser + Scissorsmith + Designer + Educator in Australia

You can find hairdressers in every town. You can find scissor sellers in every trade magazine. You will not find another person in this country who does all four jobs under one roof. Matt Grumley cuts hair. Matt sharpens scissors. Matt designs the tools in the ShearGenius range from first sketch to finished edge. And Matt trains the next generation of stylists and scissorsmiths personally. Those four roles inform each other. A scissor designed by a working hairdresser is different from a scissor designed by a marketer with a mood-board. A scissorsmith who cuts hair every week knows exactly how an edge dulls and exactly what a stylist's wrist feels at 5pm on a Saturday. That combined perspective is the reason ShearGenius exists.

A Working Career, Not a Marketing Story

Matt started hairdressing in the late 1980s. He began sharpening professionally in 1991 after importing his first set of Japanese water stones and teaching himself the hollow-ground convex edge that almost nobody in Australia was doing at the time. Through the 1990s he ran mobile sharpening routes across Victoria — salon to salon in a small van, a fixed-rate ticket, and a reputation that grew by word of mouth. In 2007 he founded ShearGenius so that the scissors he was sharpening could finally match the work he wanted to put into them. Every scissor that goes out the door now has been through his hands: designed, specified, inspected, sharpened, tensioned, packed and warrantied.

Why It Matters Who Owns Your Scissor Brand

The Australian scissor market is full of logos that sound Japanese and stories that sound heritage. What almost none of those brands mention is who owns them today. In the last seven years, several of the biggest names in this category — including Excellent Edges and Matsui/Scissor Tec — have been bought by their current operators from the previous owners. They are marketers running businesses. There is nothing illegal about that. But when you call them with a warranty problem, you are not speaking to the person who designed, forged or sharpened your scissor. You are speaking to a person who bought a brand.

At ShearGenius, the person who designed your scissor, the person who sharpened your scissor, the person who wrote your warranty, and the person who answers the phone are the same person. That is unusual. It is also slower to scale, harder to market and less profitable than the alternative — which is exactly why no-one else is doing it.

What Matt Does In a Normal Week

  • Cuts hair. Still. Every week. On real clients. Because a scissorsmith who has stopped cutting has stopped understanding what a scissor needs to do.
  • Sharpens scissors sent in from every state. Flat-rate $70 for ShearGenius, $80 for every other brand, same-day turnaround, every one done on Japanese water stones by hand.
  • Runs the mobile sharpening route across VIC, SA and TAS.
  • Designs the next ShearGenius model — currently a 6.0" forged ATS-314 with a redesigned crane-swivel handle.
  • Trains and mentors apprentices, often on SlicePay, because the apprentice with a Japanese scissor today is the salon owner buying twenty of them in five years.
  • Answers the phone. Every single call. If it rings in business hours, Matt picks it up.

The ShearGenius Promise

  1. Founder-forged. Most premium ShearGenius scissors are forged from Japanese Hitachi ATS-314 cobalt alloy steel. Some models use Japanese Cobalt Alloy. Every scissor is personally inspected, sharpened and tensioned by Matt in Ballarat.
  2. Lifetime warranty. Not conditional, not limited. A real lifetime, backed by the same person who built the tool.
  3. Flat-rate sharpening forever. $70 for ShearGenius, $80 for everyone else. No hidden fees, no upsells, no tiered pricing by brand or condition.
  4. Zero-interest SlicePay. Own a genuine Japanese scissor from $15 a week. No interest, no credit check, no surprise fees. Built in-house because no BNPL provider was willing to be fair to apprentices.
  5. No middleman. You buy direct from the scissorsmith. You talk to the scissorsmith. You get the scissorsmith's personal guarantee on the steel, the grind, the pivot and the handle.

Related Reading

Further Reading

More expert guides from Matt Grumley — 35+ years behind the chair.