The General Pencil Company is pretty well-known around town for being one of the last factories standing: a shop that makes stuff instead of one that’s been made into condos or luxury lofts. That’s what caught the attention of This Built America, a new multimedia platform from AOL that explores companies that re-imagine American manufacturing.
Fifty episodes are running for 50 weeks covering all 50 states. General Pencil was chosen to represent the entire state of New Jersey.
“About a year ago a couple of folks at AOL were brainstorming big, pie-in-the-sky ideas, where money is no object,” says Sarah Chazan, deputy editorial director at AOL. “From that came the idea of focusing on folks around the country in mid-range manufacturing that employ 50 to 500 people.”
From a journalistic perspective, the idea was intriguing. Chazan says they wanted to offer a “rich, multimedia experience of long-form journalism online. It’s very hard to keep people interested in long form online.”
Images and video appear as readers scroll through the story, which was written by Hoboken resident Laurie Petersen, editor in chief of AOL Jobs.
Petersen invokes the nostalgia of the factory’s heyday with the company’s name in serif on the façade of the old brick structure on Fleet Street.
From there she gives us a sense of the product itself, the look and scent of graphite and cedar that go into the making of one of the world’s humblest and most utilitarian products.
Edward Weissenborn opened the Jersey City operation in 1889, and the company is still family-owned. But to stay in business and avoid becoming Pencil Rentals, the family knew it had to diversify. Jim Weissenborn was living in California and running sales. His daughter, Katie, an art student who had grown up with the company, was helping with marketing. Her father and uncles were thinking of selling the company. In the early 1990s, Katie went with her father to a seminar on how to package a company for sale. But Katie realized she did not want to sell. Further, Petersen writes, “She saw the power of connecting artists with the tools they used to create their work.”
Katie has been working there for more than two decades and also has a niece in the business. The company has gone from manufacturing No. 2 pencils to making tools for artists. It’s always made chalk pastels and charcoal sticks, but now it provides information on artistic technique. It also sells a book on how to draw the pets, robots, and space monsters created by Pixar cartoonist Matthew Luhn, as well as how to make a flipbook.
Its art products include layout, carbon sketch, watercolor, draughting, and colored pencils, as well as erasers and sharpeners. The company’s website, generalpencil.com, features an “Artist Community” with a gallery; projects, tips, and techniques; and featured artists.
The company thrives with the help of a loyal and innovative work force, many of them immigrants who mirror Jersey City’s diverse population.
Made in America
Chazan says that AOL had been looking for boomtowns across the country that, despite the general decline in manufacturing, had thriving businesses that were still making things. The word “pivot” seasons her conversation, meaning companies that athletically move from one product to another to keep from going under.
“General Pencil has pivoted in the last couple of years in order to stay relevant,” she says. “The owner of the company and his daughter were the brains behind the pivot. They said, ‘Let’s keep this company going by making higher-end art supplies.’”
That, she says, enabled them to continue doing what they wanted to do and keep the company in the family. “It’s really interesting to me that companies are rethinking what it means to make things and keep relevant in manufacturing,” she says. “General Pencil was making a very specific thing and had to diversify.”
General Pencil’s broader product line comes just in time to tap into the new trend in adult coloring books. Coloring has long been a quintessential kid thing, and now adults are finding that coloring relieves stress and is fun to do. Coloring books are bestsellers in Europe.
Get out your colored pencils, folks.—JCM