magine Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but with pens, fibre tips and coloured pencils instead of fudges and candies, and you have the inside of the Caran d’Ache factory in Geneva. The last remaining manufacturer of its kind in Switzerland is filled with weird and wonderful machinery which — necessity being the mother of invention — has been largely purpose-adapted by the company. Pigments in every shade, gouaches so bright as to be almost luminous, sheets of cedarwood, the long “spaghetti” (future pencil leads) and pungent “sauces”, binders and hot wax combine into a feast for the senses.

Caran d’Ache (a phonetic transcription of the Russian word for pencil) was the pen name of Emmanuel Poiré, a Parisian Belle Epoque caricaturist, and became the new name which, at his wife’s suggestion, Arnold Schweitzer gave to Fabrique Genevoise de Crayons in 1924. The Swiss financier had recently acquired the company that had been founded a decade earlier and was now struggling in a difficult European context, dominated by the First World War.

Patricia and Carole Hubscher represent the fourth generation of the family at the head of the Swiss manufacturer of pencils and writing instruments, which shares many similarities with the world of watchmaking.

Nicolas Righetti

Arnold Schweitzer set about reviving the business. He spent heavily on advertising (many wonderful period adverts are displayed on the factory walls) but he too had to contend with global events, in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Fresh money was needed, hence Schweitzer brought new investors into the company’s capital. One of the principal shareholders would be Jakob Hubscher, an entrepreneur originally from Schaffhausen who had moved to Marseille, where he imported and exported grain.

Almost a century later, in Geneva, Caran d’Ache is headed by Jakob Hubscher’s great-granddaughters, Carole and Patricia Hubscher. “Arnold Schweitzer remained in charge of operations, then our grandfather [Jakob Hubscher’s son] left Marseille for Geneva to become CEO of the company,” says Carole Hubscher. “When he died, our father Jacques, who was only 24, travelled to Switzerland from Senegal, where he traded cereals and oil crops, for the funeral. The board of directors convinced him not to go back and to join the family firm. He stayed for more than 60 years, until 2012.”

Pencils to Fine Writing

Caran d’Ache has much in common with the watch industry. Joseph Reiser, one of its presidents and historic shareholders alongside the Hubscher family, also presided Omega and Tissot. As for Carole Hubscher, she helped develop the Calvin Klein joint venture at Swatch Group prior to co-founding Brandstorm, a brand-building company, including for watches.

She is now president of Caran d’Ache, having joined in 2008, and served for two years as CEO before handing over to Caroline Charpier. Her sister Patricia Hubscher spent more than twenty years in wealth management, at Crédit Suisse then Pictet, before taking a seat on Caran d’Ache’s board of directors in 2015. In 2022 she was made managing director.

These similarities with the watch industry extend to distribution, as a proud representative of Swiss Made around the world. “We have had agents in Asia who also distribute watches, such as Desco von Schulthess and Omtis in Hong Kong,” Carole Hubscher notes.

Caran d’Ache featured in 1982 in Europa Star ©Archives Europa Star

The Timegraph is Caran d’Ache’s first fountain pen to include an integrated watch with a mechanical movement.

Innovation has always been at the heart of the company, starting with the Prismalo in 1931. The first ever water-soluble pencil, it was used by Picasso — one of the countless artists and personalities who have worked with Caran d’Ache products, from Joan Miro to Karl Lagerfeld, Mario Botta to Zep. Other inventions include the Fixpencil, a mechanical pencil made out of metal, as well as Neocolor, now a byword for pastels.

Over time, Caran d’Ache has added writing instruments and artist’s materials to its ranges and continues to innovate, for example with its revolutionary Luminance coloured pencils whose exceptional lightfastness is tested by exposing them to the Arizona sun for three months. Its catalogue currently extends to some 500 pencil references in 300 colours, obtained by mixing 100 pigments.

The Haute Ecriture range came about in response to the globalisation of production in the 1970s, when most of the company’s European competitors were relocating manufacturing to Asia or Latin America. “Of course this was something we had to consider too, but the board of directors and our father concluded we could never compete on price and the only way forward was to become the best synonym of Swiss Made quality,” Carole Hubscher explains. “Now 77% of our suppliers are in Europe and 44% of those are in Switzerland. Characteristically of a family business, we’ve always maintained a solid network of partners. This geographic proximity also has benefits in terms of response and delivery times, as demonstrated in complex situations such as the Covid pandemic.”

Here, too, we can draw a parallel with the Swiss watch industry which, when faced with quartz technology, also in the 1970s, chose quality and expertise over quantity. The Caran d’Ache factory employs a staff of fewer than 300 people but together they are skilled in over 90 specialisms.

“We believe a luxury item is something that can be repaired, hence mastered. This is why it’s so important to have every expertise under the same roof at our Geneva factory,” continues Carole Hubscher. “We even manufacture the little spring inside our pens.” Her sister Patricia joins in: “Because we master every skill and every component, we can take customisation much further. At Caran d’Ache, you can design your own pencil or pen from the thousands of possibilities of our configurator.”

The Haute Ecriture (“fine writing”) instruments are hand-assembled, hand-decorated pens, many crafted as limited editions. Engraving, Chinese lacquer (Caran d’Ache is one of the few companies to master this technique in Europe), guilloché, enamel, gem-setting and straw marquetry, alongside electroplating and machining, are the same métiers d’art employed when creating luxury timepieces, although an artisan who joins Caran d’Ache from a watch brand has to adapt their technique. As Patricia Hubscher explains, “Polishing a pen is entirely different to polishing a watch.”

Collabs with Max Büsser and Eric Giroud

There are considerably more pencils and pens in the world than there are watches, with over 35 billion pencils produced annually worldwide compared with less than a billion watches. At Caran d’Ache alone, annual production in volume far exceeds that of the entire Swiss watch industry. “Our margins are much lower, when you consider how much work goes into our creations. On the other hand, our sector is far less cyclical than watchmaking. Our growth is moderate but continuous,” says Carole Hubscher, who knows both industries inside-out. An individual pencil starts at CHF 1.50 up to the most exclusive Haute Ecriture pens, which exceed CHF 100,000 and are, incidentally, models made with companies that also work with the watch industry.

Unsurprisingly, given the many overlaps, Caran d’Ache has initiated numerous collaborations with the watch sector in the past two decades. One of the most emblematic is MB&F founder Maximilian Büsser’s design for the Astrograph. The company has also worked with the celebrated watch designer Eric Giroud, whose concept for a fountain pen reproduced the gears of a watch movement in intricate detail. Special mention also for the Timegraph, a fusion of Haute Ecriture and Haute Horlogerie, and the first time a mechanical watch had been fitted in a fountain pen. The miniature, manual-winding movement comprising 145 components was developed by Le Temps Manufacture SA in Fleurier.

Products such as these are an exception. The Swiss watch industry has achieved unprecedented evocativeness but has, at the same time, dramatically reduced volume production these past twenty years, with the result that not everyone will have the chance to own the watch of their dreams. In contrast, Caran d’Ache has universal appeal with extensive ranges of products that are considerably more democratic yet reprise the visual language of luxury goods.

But will it maintain this broad reach if young generations distance themselves from writing, even drawing, by hand to plunge further into their digital worlds? Like mechanical watchmaking, might it too, ultimately, become less relevant to daily life?

Caran d’Ache has also occasionally produced special watches, such as the one worn by Carole Hubscher.

Nicolas Righetti

Carole Hubscher takes a more nuanced view: “However counterintuitive it may seem, the strongest growth over recent years has been from writing instruments. Volumes haven’t decreased. On the contrary, we can still gain market share internationally.” A serial sticky-note user, Patricia Hubscher underlines “the eternal human need to express ourselves through our hands, in the face of digital saturation.”

Her sister tells us how scientific studies have demonstrated that the brain retains handwritten information better. From an emotional standpoint, particularly at a time of artificial intelligence, a handwritten note or a drawing touches a chord. Pens and pencils, like watches, go beyond their utilitarian function to become vectors for shared experiences.

A charter for the next generation

Both sisters agree that business has been made more complex not by demand but by the constant introduction of standards, often a consequence of European Union legislation. “I think our formulas have changed more in the past 25 years than throughout the company’s entire history prior to that,” Carole Hubscher declares. “We’re constantly adapting, especially to restrictions on raw materials.”

Distributed at over 2,500 points of sale and just about every school in Switzerland, its biggest market where the brand enjoys iconic status, Caran d’Ache has a more exclusive distribution and image internationally, from Ginza in Japan to New York. Some countries know it more for its fine art products, others for its writing instruments. It teams up with young artists who teach painting and drawing techniques to the public in its online Creative Classes.

Nicolas Righetti

Looking ahead, the brand aims to use more Swiss wood for its pencils, thereby anchoring itself even more strongly in the region. Already proposed for limited editions, Swiss wood is denser, more resinous and therefore more complex to work with than Californian cedar. Most of all, Caran d’Ache is preparing to relocate in 2027 to a brand-new, 35,000-square-metre site in Bernex, also in the canton of Geneva. Other Swiss cantons were prepared to do as much as provide free land in order to attract this entrepreneurial gem, but the company had no wish to leave its home canton.

The future will, of course, include the arrival of the fifth generation of Hubschers; a “charter” is already being drawn up with the six representatives of this next generation (both Carole and Patricia Hubscher have three children, all still students). This original document sets out not obligations but describes shared values for the years ahead. “This way, says Carole Hubscher, “they learn to talk with each other, take joint decisions or make concessions. This is no ordinary profession. It requires a certain long-term vision. First though, as we ourselves did, our advice would be to go off, have different experiences… then come back!”