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Crayola LLC - One big Player
Crayola is a brand of artists' supplies manufactured by Crayola LLC (formerly
Binney & Smith Company) and best known for its crayons. The company is based in
Forks Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania. Originally an industrial
pigment supply company, Crayola soon shifted its focus to art products for home
and school use, beginning with chalk, then crayons, followed later by colored
pencils, markers, paints, modeling clay, and other related goods. All
Crayola-branded products are marketed as nontoxic and safe for use by children.
Most Crayola crayons are made in the USA.
The company also produces Silly Putty and a line of professional art products
under the Portfolio Series brand.
Crayola LLC claims the Crayola brand has 99% name recognition in U.S. consumer
households, and says its products are sold in over 80 countries
The company was founded by cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith in New York
City in 1885 as Binney & Smith. Initial products were colorants for industrial
use, including red iron oxide pigments used in barn paint and carbon black
chemicals used for making tires black and extending their useful lifespan.
Binney & Smith's new process of creating inexpensive black colorants was
entered into the chemistry industries competition at the 1900 Paris Exposition
under the title "carbon gas blacks, lamp or oil blacks, 'Peerless' black" and
earned the company a gold medal award in chemical and pharmaceutical
arts. Also in 1900, the company added production of slate school pencils.
Binney's experimentation with industrial materials, including slate waste,
cement, and talc, led to the invention of the first dustless white chalk, for
which the company won a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
In 1902, Binney & Smith developed and introduced the Staonal marking crayon.
Then Edwin Binney, working with his wife, Alice Stead Binney, developed his own
famous product line of wax crayons beginning on 10 June 1903, which it sold
under the brand name "Crayola." The Crayola name was coined by Alice Binney,
wife of company founder Edwin and a former schoolteacher. It comes from
"craie", French for "chalk," and "ola" for "oleaginous," or "oily." Crayola
introduced its crayons not with one box, but with a full product line. By 1905,
the line had expanded to offering 18 different-sized crayon boxes with five
different-sized crayons, only two of which survive today - the "standard size"
(a standard sized Crayola crayon is 35/8" X 5/16") and the "large size" (large
sized crayola crayons are 4" X 7/16"). The product line offered crayon boxes
contained containing 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18, 24, 28, or 30 different color
crayons.
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