How some young women’s vanity led to the highlighter pen
Posted by: organic on Nov 11, 2010
Tagged in: Untagged
It's always fascinating to pick up a simple object on your desk and contemplate how it ever came to arrive there in the first place.
Take the ubiquitous Stabilo Boss, the World's biggest selling highlighter pen. How this came to claim a spot in every office stationery cupboard is remarkable and owes much to some ingenious German women who stumbled across the cosmetic pencil early in the 20th Century.
The Schwanhausser Brothers (Schwan meaning Swan and spawning the modern Swan name and logo) were well established manufacturers of traditional pencils in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. One of the company's smaller lines was the Dermatograph, a soft, wax based pencil designed specifically for surgeons when marking out skin for incision. Evidently some women started using these as eyebrow pencils and Schwan subsequently decided to make them specifically for this purpose. Thus, in 1927, the cosmetic pencil was officially born.
Even to this day, Schwan Stabilo remains a major manufacturer of cosmetic pencils although for other brand names rather than their own. In 1935, the company was given another important boost, again almost by accident, when the Maggi food corporation ordered 300,000 pencils with their name printed on them for free distribution in butchers' shops. Schwan Stabilo had seen the future and immediately set up a department to sell pens and pencils embossed with advertising content.
By the 1960's the company was firmly established in the pen market and was one of the pioneers of novel felt-tip and fibre-tip varieties.
However, it was in 1971, after the company had set up its own injection moulding facility, that the now World famous Schwan Stabilo Boss highlighter with its trademark fluorescent ink was first developed. So next time you order something like a Stabilo Rollerball Point Pen from Cartridgeline, just picture those young frauleins pocketing their employer's wax pencils in order to sort their eyebrows out!
Take the ubiquitous Stabilo Boss, the World's biggest selling highlighter pen. How this came to claim a spot in every office stationery cupboard is remarkable and owes much to some ingenious German women who stumbled across the cosmetic pencil early in the 20th Century.
The Schwanhausser Brothers (Schwan meaning Swan and spawning the modern Swan name and logo) were well established manufacturers of traditional pencils in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. One of the company's smaller lines was the Dermatograph, a soft, wax based pencil designed specifically for surgeons when marking out skin for incision. Evidently some women started using these as eyebrow pencils and Schwan subsequently decided to make them specifically for this purpose. Thus, in 1927, the cosmetic pencil was officially born.
Even to this day, Schwan Stabilo remains a major manufacturer of cosmetic pencils although for other brand names rather than their own. In 1935, the company was given another important boost, again almost by accident, when the Maggi food corporation ordered 300,000 pencils with their name printed on them for free distribution in butchers' shops. Schwan Stabilo had seen the future and immediately set up a department to sell pens and pencils embossed with advertising content.
By the 1960's the company was firmly established in the pen market and was one of the pioneers of novel felt-tip and fibre-tip varieties.
However, it was in 1971, after the company had set up its own injection moulding facility, that the now World famous Schwan Stabilo Boss highlighter with its trademark fluorescent ink was first developed. So next time you order something like a Stabilo Rollerball Point Pen from Cartridgeline, just picture those young frauleins pocketing their employer's wax pencils in order to sort their eyebrows out!
