Crayola - History

History

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.

Initially formed as a partnership, Binney & Smith incorporated in 1902.

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 3⅝" × 5/16") and the "large size" (large sized crayola crayons are 4" × 7/16"). The product line offered crayon boxes contained containing 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18, 24, 28, or 30 different color crayons. Some of these boxes were targeted for artists and contained crayons with no wrappers, while others had a color number printed on the wrapper that corresponded to a number on a list of color names printed inside the box lid, but some boxes contained crayons with their color names printed on their wrappers.

The Rubens Crayola line, started in 1903 (not in the 1920s, as claimed by some sources), was directly targeted at artists and designed to compete with the Raphael brand of crayons from Europe. The crayon boxes sold from five cents for a No.6 Rubens box containing six different-colored crayons to $1.50 for the No. 500 Rubens Special Artists and Designers Crayon box containing 24 different-colored, larger (4¼" × 1/2") crayons.

In April 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair, Binney & Smith won the Gold Medal for their An-Du-Septic dustless chalk. Subsequently, Crayola used the opportunity to develop a new packaging strategy by emphasizing their gold medal on the front of many of their products and crayon boxes. This strategy turned out to be so successful and recognizable to their brand that they phased out nearly all of their other Crayola line box designs to adapt to the gold medal format, which appeared on their packaging for the next 50-plus years.

In 1905, the prototype offering of their new No. 8 crayon box (with eight crayons) featured a copy from the side of the medal with an eagle on it. This was changed to the other side of the medal with the 1904 date on it in Roman numerals.

Binney & Smith purchased the Munsell Color Company crayon product line in 1926, and inherited 22 new colors, 11 in the maximum and 11 in the middle hue ranges. They retained the Munsell name on products such as “Munsell-Crayola” and “Munsell-Perma” until 1934, and then incorporated their colors into their own Crayola Gold Medal line of boxes.

In 1939, Crayola, by combining its existing crayon colors with the Munsell colors, introduced its largest color assortment product to date; a "No. 52 Drawing Crayon 52 Color Assortment", which was retired by the 1944 price list.

In 1949, Crayola introduced the "Crayola No. 48" containing 48 color crayons in a non-peggable floor box.

Further expansion took place in 1958 with the introduction of the 64-color pack that included the company's first crayon sharpener built into the box. The 64-color box was called "a watershed" moment in the history of the Crayola crayon by Smithsonian National Museum of American History curator David Shayt.

The corporation became a publicly-traded company under the symbol BYS on the American Stock Exchange in 1963, and later moved to the New York Stock Exchange under the same symbol in 1978.

In 1977, Binney & Smith acquired the rights to Silly Putty, a stretchy bouncy toy. Crayola markers were introduced in 1978 to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Crayola crayons. In 1984, the company was acquired by Hallmark Cards, a privately held corporation. Colored pencils and a line of washable markers were added in 1987.

Crayola Crayons were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 1998. In the same year, the Crayola Factory opened.

On January 1, 2007 Binney & Smith became Crayola LLC, to improve Crayola branding as part of Hallmark.

In 2011, My First Crayola was launched. Products include triangular crayons and flat-tipped markers.