In 1761, a cabinet maker named Kaspar Faber began producing pencils in the small town of Stein, just outside Nuremberg (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). Consider what has happened since. The Holy Roman Empire, which governed...
In 1761, a cabinet maker named Kaspar Faber began producing pencils in the small town of Stein, just outside Nuremberg (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). Consider what has happened since. The Holy Roman Empire, which governed Stein when Kaspar opened his workshop, ceased to exist. Germany was invented, destroyed, divided, and reunified. Two world wars rolled through Bavaria. The typewriter arrived, then the fountain pen for the masses, then the ballpoint, then the computer, then the phone in your pocket, each one billed as the death of handwriting.
The Faber family is still in Stein. It still makes pencils. It has done so through nine generations, and today the company it built produces roughly two billion wood-cased pencils a year, sells in more than 120 countries, employs around 6,500 people, and posted revenue of 649.2 million euros in the 2022 to 2023 financial year (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia; de.wikipedia.org).
Two billion units a year of a product invented before the French Revolution. That is the whole thesis of this essay, and it is worth stating plainly before we walk the timeline: a boring product held for 260 years beats exciting products traded.
For its first three generations the business was a respectable local pencil maker trading under the name A. W. Faber. The transformation came with the fourth generation. Lothar von Faber, who lived from 1817 to 1896, decided that a pencil could be a brand, at a time when pencils were sold loose and anonymous like nails. He opened branches in New York in 1849, London in 1851, Paris in 1855, Vienna in 1872, and St. Petersburg in 1874 (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). A family firm from a Bavarian village was running a five-city international network before Germany was even a unified country.
Lothar's most durable move was legal, not commercial. Tired of imitators stamping the Faber name on inferior pencils, he petitioned the Reichstag for trademark protection, and Germany enacted trademark legislation in 1875. In 1894 his mark became one of the earliest registered German trademarks, and he secured registrations in the United States, Russia, England, Spain, France, and Italy (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). Understand what he was doing: he was converting reputation, which dies with a founder, into property, which can be inherited. A trademark is a container that lets trust pass between generations.
Succession nearly broke the line in the 1890s. Lothar outlived his son Wilhelm, and the future of the firm came to rest on his granddaughter Ottilie. In 1898 she married Count Alexander zu Castell-Rüdenhausen, and from that union came both a new family line and a new name: Faber-Castell (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). Company history records that the name change was formalized in 1928, after Alexander's death, when the firm became A. W. Faber "Castell" under Roland von Faber-Castell (faber-castell.com/corporate/history; Faber-Castell, Wikipedia).
Notice the direction of the deal. In most aristocratic marriages of that era, the noble name absorbed the commercial one. Here the pencil name survived the count. The family understood that the Faber name, protected by Lothar's trademarks and carried on millions of pencils, was the more valuable inheritance. The count's contribution shows up elsewhere: the deep green that still wraps the flagship pencils was adopted in 1905, reportedly to match the colors of Alexander's regiment, the same year the company launched the Castell 9000, a graphite pencil still in production, followed by the Polychromos colored pencils in 1908, also still made today (Faber-Castell, Wikipedia; faber-castell.com/corporate/history).
A product introduced in 1905 that is still on the shelf in 2026 is not nostalgia. It is proof that the family chose depth over novelty, generation after generation.
The eighth generation is the one most worth studying. Anton-Wolfgang Graf von Faber-Castell was born in Bamberg on 7 June 1941. He did not walk straight into the family firm. He studied law in Zurich, completed a commercial apprenticeship, attended the IMEDE management school in Lausanne, and then spent years as an investment banker with Credit Suisse White Weld in New York and London, running the London branch of Crédit Suisse First Boston from 1975. He was appointed to help manage the family company in 1975 and became sole managing partner after his father's death in 1978. He later bought out his siblings to consolidate control, and chaired the board when the company converted to a stock corporation in 2000 (Anton-Wolfgang Graf von Faber-Castell, Wikipedia).
He inherited a company in the least glamorous corner of manufacturing, at exactly the moment cheap Asian production was commoditizing it. His answer was discipline, in two directions at once.
Upward, he refused to let the pencil be a commodity. In 1993 he launched the Graf von Faber-Castell line, premium writing instruments that sold the company's history at luxury prices (Anton-Wolfgang Graf von Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). The message to the market was simple: others can make a pencil, only we can make a Faber-Castell. A family that has held one product for two centuries owns a story no competitor can copy, and he priced that story.
Downward, he secured volume where the trees grow. Brazil became the group's manufacturing heart: the São Carlos plant is described as the largest in the group, and the company's Brazilian operations produce around 1.5 billion colored pencils a year, which German-language sources describe as the largest colored-pencil factory in the world (São Carlos, Wikipedia; de.wikipedia.org). Anton-Wolfgang served as honorary consul for Brazil, a detail that tells you how central the country was to his design (Anton-Wolfgang Graf von Faber-Castell, Wikipedia).
Here is the decision that turns a pencil company into a thousand-year playbook entry. A wood-pencil maker's existential risk is wood. From the 1980s onward, the company established its own pine plantations near Prata in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Faber-Castell's own materials and press accounts have described the program at roughly ten thousand hectares, supplying the large majority of the wood for its Brazilian production, with the plantations absorbing more carbon than the company's global production emits. Those figures are the company's own and I could not independently verify the exact hectare and carbon numbers, so treat the precise scale as company-reported. The direction of the strategy, vertical integration into planted forest decades before harvest, is well documented across the company's history and sustainability communications (faber-castell.com).
Sit with the arithmetic. A pine planted in Prata takes on the order of two decades to become pencil wood. A manager who plants it will likely not be in the job at harvest. Anton-Wolfgang, who died on 21 January 2016 in Houston at age 74, planted forests he knew younger hands would cut (Anton-Wolfgang Graf von Faber-Castell, Wikipedia). That is not a metaphor for long-horizon thinking. It is the literal activity. Most families talk about planning for grandchildren. This family plants for them, in rows, with a harvest schedule.
After his death, the company did something equally instructive: in 2017 it appointed Stefan Leitz, the first chief executive from outside the family in nine generations, while the family, including the ninth generation around Charles von Faber-Castell, remained the owners and sits over the business as shareholders and board members (de.wikipedia.org; faber-castell.com/corporate/history). Ownership stayed in the bloodline. Management went to the best available operator. Families that confuse those two roles lose one or both.
You are not going to build a pencil empire. The transferable machinery is smaller than it looks.
First, boring held beats exciting traded. The Fabers never found a product more exciting than the pencil. They found the same product, made better, sold wider, held longer. An ordinary family's version is a rental property kept forty years, an index portfolio never churned, a shop compounding in one trade. Every trade out of a good boring asset into a thrilling one is a tax on your grandchildren.
Second, convert reputation into property. Lothar made good pencils, and then he registered the name in seven countries. Your family's version: the land title processed, the business formally registered, the trademark filed, the agreement written. Trust dies with people. Documents survive them.
Third, price your history. After enough years, the story itself becomes an asset. A second-generation business should charge more than a first-generation one, and say why.
Fourth, do the tree test. Once a year, ask: what did we plant this year that only our grandchildren will harvest? Education funds, land, trees, a business's brand. If the answer is nothing, the family is consuming its future, whatever the income statement says.
Fifth, separate ownership from management before the crisis. Faber-Castell decided a non-family CEO could run what only the family may own. Write your family's version of that rule while nobody needs it.
Nine generations, one product, one town, and a forest growing quietly across the Atlantic on a twenty-year clock. That is the playbook.
Now the decision in front of you. This year, will you plant something with a harvest date beyond your own working life, a tree your grandchildren will cut, in whatever form your family's trees take, or will another year pass in which everything you build is scheduled to be consumed by you? Choose the planting, and name it, this month.