Staedtler

Our company history is full of free spirits who put their ideas into practice. It was in 1662 when Friedrich Staedtler came up with his idea, which was free from all conventions. Against the requirements of the Nuremberg Council, he began to manufacture both leads and the body for pencils. In doing so, he abolished the separation between the production of the lead by the lead cutters, and the production of the lead‘s wooden encasement by the carpenters.

He established an independent, effective pencil-making trade in Nuremberg.
He followed his conviction and stood by his idea. His great-great-grandson
Johann Sebastian Staedtler invented the coloured pencil as we still know it today, and also made it available to a wider audience outside of artist studios. For former STAEDTLER Managing Director Rudolf Kreutzer, employees were already the top priority at the beginning of the 20th century. He also had an eye on the environment and noted in a handwritten report back in 1909 during a sales trip for STAEDTLER that “large stocks of the well-known Californian redwood (...) were heavily thinned with the saw.”

Today STAEDTLER is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of writing, painting, drawing and modelling products. We create ideas that make our products more sustainable, efficient and durable. In this way, we want to help people around the world realise and share their ideas. To achieve this goal, our currently more than 2,300 employees around the world work on the right products every day.