Caran d'Ache

The company was established as "Fabrique Genevoise de Crayons Ecridor" in Geneva in 1915. When Arnold Schweitzer took over the company in 1924, he renamed it after Caran d'Ache, the pseudonym of the Russian-French satiric political cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré – who in turn took his pseudonym from карандаш (karandash), the Russian word for 'pencil', itself of Turkic origin.

In 1974, the company moved its production center to Thonex, a municipality of the Canton of Geneva. The company is known to include precious diamonds in the pens, and for that, in 1999, the Modernista Diamonds pen was included in the Guinness Book of Records as "the most expensive pen in the world".

In June 2012, the owner Jacques Hübscher handed over the management to his daughter Carole Hübscher.

Some of Caran d'Ache products developed over the years include:

Technograph, the classic pencil introduced in the 1920s, the most longstanding product to date

Fixpencil, a mechanical pencil invented by Carl Schmid in 1929.

Prismalo, the first watercolor pencil in the world, launched in 1931.