The Cretacolor Smuggler

Cretacolor is an oddball brand. Pencil manufacturing these days requires significant scale to serve the discount market, but Cretacolor essentially does this by simply monopolizing their small national market in Austria. They do have a global reach, with a fairly well-known position in the art supply space, and their web site shares this narrow focus. But their line of pencil products is significantly wider than this would lead us to believe.

Cretacolor has only two lines of internationally marketed graphite woodcase pencils: Artist Studio and Cleos. They also have water-soluble graphite, several lines of coloured pencils, aquarelle, woodless graphite, and pastels. These are all very high-quality and a pleasure to use. Their graphite does not share the typical European tendency toward hardness - I find myself able to easily write with an H or 2H, and their Artist Studio colour pencils are the best I’ve used to date.

But for those inside Austria, there is a lot more. Cretacolor markets the Cretacolor 150 line of pencils, which is from the same factory run as the globally-marketed Cleos, with a different varnish. These look oddly familiar to anyone who has seen Koh-i-Noor’s original “gold” 1500 line. That’s because they are the same. When I read Bleitstift’s post about this fun fact, I started my search for how to get my hands on these. It was the most difficult task I’ve yet assigned myself in my pencil-collecting journey, but I was eventually successful.

Oddly, Cretacolor does not direct-market their products on their website, but rather offers Amazon links. On top of that, there are no Cretacolor 150s on their website. There are none on Amazon.de. There are none on various other European stationers’ sites. When I emailed their customer service asking for this, they told me that these were not available for export, but confirmed that the 150 and the Cleos were the same pencil (but with radically different consumer-side pricing and merchandizing).

My assumption upon reading this was that the Cold War split of the original Hardtmuth brands and trademarks ended when the Czech brand started reaching west in the 1990s.

The fact that there was a company using the same trademarks and brands likely wasn’t as well tolerated in the 1990s as in the 1950s, and I’m assuming the continued existence of their similar products must be the result of a noncompete agreement between the Czech and Austrian companies, allowing the former to become one of the largest stationers in the world in exchange for allowing Cretacolor a virtual monopoly in its home market.

Many Austrian office suppliers and retailers not only offer the Cretacolor 150, they also seem to lack material competitor offerings. Cretacolor also has a “generic” line of pencils in four grades, and even an entire additional brand, Jolly, geared toward students and kids.

I also found some odd steno and copying pencils that were branded as Brevillier, the former with similar but slightly modified varnish from the Cretacolor version.

I found three retailers with sizeable listings of Cretacolor and its subsidiary products: Vendo, Der Grissemann, and Pagro Direkt. The first only shipped within Austria, the second only locally, and the third only in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). This last one is where I found the weak spot in the blockade.

For a while, I have had an account with MyGermany, a drop-shipping company that has helped me grab things like my Stabilo samples, Donald Duck comic boxes, and records and books whose point-of-sale retailer couldn’t be coaxed to ship direct across the Atlantic. Pagro Direkt offered an additional complication: They were a discount retailer only for businesses, and shipped only by COD.

I still gave it a try, using MyGermany’s concierge service. This worked! The box of Austrian-made treasures made it from Austria to Germany, then from Germany to my eager hands. As far as I know, my creative shopping followed the letter of the “law", if not the spirit. I felt like I’d accomplished quite the insurgent feat, even if it was just a shopping spree.