Helmut Zeilinger, Technical Product Manager at Faber-Castell

The aforementioned short feeling resistance when sharpening a pencil may be an unimportant annoyance for some users but it is just one example of how careless workmanship and negligent planning can lead to an inferior product. A pencil should not splinter and the lead should not break or separate from the wood. "Some people may still have had pencils like this in school, where you could push the lead through and use the wood as a blowpipe. I remember those," says Zeilinger. Just as he remembers pencils and colour pencils that scratched when they touched the paper, when they had hardly any colouring power, or when the lead constantly broke while the pencil was sharpened. Today he knows that all these disturbing factors are signs of poor quality. 

Zeilinger has delved into the intricacies of sharpening pencils and gained some insights – some of which he found surprising. He found that: "Hardly anyone thinks about sharpening." Some people buy high-quality, expensive pencils but use the same sharpener for many years. "The sharpener gets dull over time, just like any razor blade or kitchen knife," Zeilinger explains. A dull sharpener tears the wood and damages the lead. With careful analysis and calculations, Zeilinger's team discovered that the sharpener should be replaced after about twelve pencils have been sharpened into stubs.

Zeilinger also found that pencil and colour pencil leads require completely different sharpeners. "The sharpening angle is crucial," he says. "If I sharpen colour pencils too sharp, for example, the lead breaks more easily because it is softer than the graphite lead of a pencil." That's not only annoying, but it’s also ultimately a waste of material if you have to constantly re-sharpen. Zeilinger's "baby", as he calls it, is therefore the Grip trio sharpening box. This sharpener has three different sharpening holes and blades, each of which is positioned at a different angle – from an angle of 23 degrees for pencils to 30 degrees for jumbo colour pencils. "Common universal sharpeners usually try to cover all pencils with the same 24 degree angle," he says. That, too, is part of the search for quality: changing a sharpener’s slant slightly with lasting effect for the pencils.

Research and development are also vitally important for creating quality. On the one hand, quality means something timeless: "Customers who held a Faber-Castell pencil in their hands 40 years ago and found it supple and valuable should feel exactly the same today," says Zeilinger. Indeed, the basic formulas that Lothar von Faber designed some 180 years ago still apply today, especially as far as the degrees of hardness he determined are concerned. On the other hand, however, the quest for quality can never stand still. With every new discovery about materials or processes, there are also new opportunities for innovation. Like the discovery that triangular jumbo pens fit better in the hands of novice writers than hexagonal pens. Or like the development of the Faber-Castell Dust-Free eraser that doesn't crumble. "We always set ourselves the task of being innovative," says Zeilinger. "We want to be the first to market with products that no one else has."

In other words, innovation that doesn’t change the essence of the brand. Customers must be able to rely on getting quality when they buy a Faber-Castell brand pencil, says Zeilinger: "I don't think about what the engine block of my car is made of, I expect it to work.” Customers should be able to buy Faber-Castell with a clear conscience. Which brings us back to the beginning: the importance of care and concentration on details, even before production begins. "Process reliability," Zeilinger says, "means that the standards we have set are definitely adhered to in every single pencil. Without standards, there is no quality." For example, colour pencils should not contain too many fillers that weaken the colour: "Otherwise you spoil the fun and joy of colouring for children.

This is crucial for an important target group: artists, i.e.: professionals who put particularly high demands on their colour pencils, or more precisely, on the pigments within them. "Pigment production today is very high-tech," Zeilinger explains. Pigments are analysed and tested in the laboratory to ensure that they do not change, even when exposed to sunlight: "Artists attach great importance to durable colours, after all, they want their works to be preserved for posterity," says Zeilinger. And artists also expect the colours to be perfectly accurate – i.e.: not contaminated by the smallest amounts of other colours because a different colour was previously produced in the paint mixing kettle. That, too, is process reliability. "Professionals then naturally spend more money on a pencil if they can rely on these parameters," Zeilinger adds: "With colour smears and mixing ratios, or with 'mixed texture' techniques such as mixing watercolour and polychrome, being able to rely on identical colours is what really counts."