About Fellowes
Fellowes has been building office equipment since 1917, when Harry Fellowes founded the company as the Bankers Box Company to manufacture record storage boxes. Since the 1960s the company has expanded well beyond storage into paper shredders, laminators, and binding equipment, and it remains headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, operating from locations around the world under continuous family ownership for more than a century.
The shredder and laminator lines are where Fellowes shows up most in our testing. Its Powershred shredders are built around a 100% Jam Proof system that detects resistance and powers through a stack rather than simply reversing, and Fellowes backs its cutters with a lifetime warranty plus two years of product and service coverage. On the laminating side, the Saturn3i series introduced InstaHeat technology, cutting warm-up time to about a minute so a laminator can go from off to ready without the multi-minute wait typical of entry-level machines.
Brand website: fellowes.com
What Fellowes makes
Fellowes's range runs wider than the products we review. The lines we know best from our own testing are marked with a star:
Paper Shredders
Cross-cut and micro-cut models from compact home-office units up to high-capacity Jam Proof machines rated for daily heavy use. — featured on DeskRated
Laminators
Pouch laminators including the Saturn3i line, built around InstaHeat fast warm-up technology. — featured on DeskRated
Binding Machines
Comb, wire, and thermal binding systems for reports and presentations.
Desktop & Ergonomic Accessories
Monitor risers, keyboard trays, and other workstation accessories.
Records Storage
Bankers Box-branded file storage boxes, the product line the company was originally founded on.
Commercial Air Purification & Contract Interiors
Workspace air purifiers and modular office furniture for commercial environments.
Why we recognized Fellowes
The DeskRated Top Brand recognition isn't paid for and can't be applied for. We award it to the brands whose products consistently stand out in our hands-on category reviews. Fellowes earned it on the strength of the products below, evaluated the same way every product on this site is: bought, used at a real desk, and judged on merit.
Fellowes products we rated highly
Fellowes Saturn3i 125 Laminator with InstaHeat Technology
In our testing, the Saturn3i's 60-second InstaHeat warm-up and 19-inch-per-minute speed made it the fastest laminator on the page to go from off to laminating, and its 12.5-inch feed width handled legal-size and oversize documents that 9-inch machines could not accommodate.
Read the 7 Best Laminators of 2026 guide →
Fellowes 14C10 14-Sheet Cross-Cut Paper Shredder
SilentShred technology kept this shredder running measurably quieter than the standard models we tested alongside it, and its 10-minute continuous run time doubled the usable session length of most 5-minute-limit machines before thermal cutoff, backed by a 6.0-gallon bin, the largest we found among non-premium shredders on the page.
Read the 7 Best Paper Shredders of 2026 guide →
Fellowes 99Ci 18-Sheet Cross-Cut Paper Shredder
Fellowes' jam-proof sensor and auto-reverse system kept this model running through large document purges without a clearance event in the reviews we examined, and its 9-gallon bin was the largest on the page, cutting down on emptying frequency during high-volume shredding sessions.
Read the 7 Best Paper Shredders of 2026 guide →What earned Fellowes the recognition
- Over a century of continuous, family-owned operation in office equipment manufacturing, dating to the founding of the Bankers Box Company in 1917.
- Powershred shredders use a 100% Jam Proof system that detects resistance and powers through a stack instead of simply reversing, backed by a lifetime cutter warranty plus two years of product and service coverage.
- The Saturn3i laminator's InstaHeat technology cuts warm-up time to about a minute, meaningfully faster than the 3-to-5-minute warm-up typical of entry-level thermal laminators.
- In our testing across two product categories, Fellowes machines consistently offered the largest bin capacities and longest continuous run times among the shredders we reviewed, reducing interruptions during high-volume sessions.
- Product range spans shredders, laminators, binding equipment, desktop accessories, and records storage, giving offices a single manufacturer for document handling from creation through disposal.