A federal judge has ordered Finnish tool company Fiskars to pay Madison startup Woodland Tools $1.4 million and change some of its packaging, according to The Capital Times. The news follows a lawsuit that alleged false advertising.
In 2022, Fiskars sued Woodland Tools, claiming that the latter had hired former Fiskars employees to work for Lumino, a company owned by Woodland Tools president Mike Kollman. This would have violated a noncompete agreement that prohibited them from working for a competitor.
Woodland Tools brought its own lawsuit in response, accusing Fiskars of interfering in its business relationships and misleading customers by claiming some Fiskars tools had multiple times the cutting power of the competition, and certain products were designed in the U.S.
A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin found Fiskars liable for willful false advertising in October; the judge dismissed the other claims.
In addition to making the $1.4 million payment to Woodland Tools, Fiskars must remove vague claims from the packaging and signs for a dozen products. It is barred from creating new “garden cutting tool” packaging with similar ambiguous claims, and it must eliminate two products’ claims that they were designed in the U.S.
