Caran d’ache, visit to the factory which gives good looks

Published on December 14, 2024 at 4:33 p.m. / Modified on December 14, 2024 at 4:34 p.m.

4 mins. reading

You won’t chew your Prismalo pencils like before. Did you know? Their exterior varnish has, for more than ten years now, been a water-based solution, therefore solvent-free. This “simple” recipe change required the invention of tailor-made machines to extend the drying time. The pencil, now varnished six times, must travel 40 meters in the wind tunnel before being dry. So we observe it – magic of factory visits! –, alongside his thousands of fellows, go up and down the four floors of a vast mechanical circuit, like a ball in a Tinguely machine, before coming to lodge in the small wooden locker on which he will travel until to the next stages of its finishing: marking with gold foil, encapsulation, cutting and storage – by hand please – in the rainbow of a thermoformed tray, inside a pretty iron box.

Attending such a ballet is an opportunity: “Visiting a watch factory in Switzerland is quite easy. But visiting a pencil factory in Europe is something else!” declares our guide, Eric Vitus, thirty-seven years in the house and responsible for color production. “There are only three left… All the others are now in China, India or Brazil.” It is therefore in Thônex, on the edge of the Franco-Geneva border, that all the colors of childhood are brewed. Caran d’Ache has been supplying Swiss schools with pencils, perhaps since the dawn of time, since everyone seems to remember like a madeleine the tenderness of their varnished wood which cracks under the tooth. But by dint of having chewed on it, we forget that this local brand also exports the best products intended for fine arts throughout the world, those which manage to compete with the German giant Faber-Castell in a completely unequal balance of power. : “There are 6,000 of them, while here, there are 300 of us,” says Eric Vitus.

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