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Crayola LLC, formerly the Binney & Smith Company, is an American manufacturing and retail company specializing in art supplies. It is known for its brand Crayola and best known for its . The company is headquartered in Forks Township, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley region of the state. Since 1984, Crayola has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Hallmark Cards.
Originally an industrial pigment supply company, Crayola soon shifted its focus to art products for home and school use, beginning with chalk, then crayons, followed later by , marker pen, , modeling clay, and other related goods. All Crayola-branded products are marketed as toxicity and safe for use by children. Most Crayola crayons are manufactured in the United States.
Crayola also produces Silly Putty and a line of professional art products under the 'Portfolio Series brand', including acrylic paint, watercolor, tempera, and .
Crayola LLC claims the Crayola brand has 99% name recognition in U.S. consumer households, and says its products are marketed and sold in over 80 countries.
Initially formed as a partnership, Binney & Smith corporation in 1902, and in that year Binney & Smith developed and introduced the Staonal marking crayon. Then Edwin Binney, working with his wife, Alice Stead Binney, developed his own famous product line of wax crayons beginning on June 10, 1903, which it sold under the brand name Crayola. The Crayola name was coined by Alice Binney who was a former schoolteacher. It comes from craie (French for "chalk") and ola for "oleaginous" or "oily." The suffix "-ola" was also popular in commercial use at the time, lending itself to products such as granola (1886), pianola (1901), Victrola (1905), Shinola (1907), and Mazola (1911). Crayola introduced its crayons not with one box, but with a full product line. By 1905, the line had expanded to offering 18 different-sized crayon boxes with five different-sized crayons, only two of which survive today—the "standard size" (a standard sized Crayola crayon is ) and the "large size" (large sized Crayola crayons are ). The product line offered crayon boxes containing 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18, 24, 28, or 30 different color crayons. Some of these boxes were targeted for artists and contained crayons with no wrappers, while others had a color number printed on the wrapper that corresponded to a number on a list of color names printed inside the box lid, but some boxes contained crayons with their color names printed on their wrappers.
The Rubens Crayola line, started in 1903, was directly targeted at artists and designed to compete with the Raphael brand of crayons from Europe. The crayon boxes sold from five cents for a No.6 Rubens box containing six different-colored crayons to $1.50 for the No. 500 Rubens Special Artists and Designers Crayon box containing 24 different-colored, larger () crayons.
In April 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair, Binney & Smith won the Golden Medal for their An-Du-Septic dustless chalk. Subsequently, Crayola used the opportunity to develop a new packaging strategy by emphasizing their gold medal on the front of many of their products and crayon boxes. This strategy turned out to be so successful and recognizable to their brand that they phased out nearly all of their other Crayola line box designs to adapt to the gold medal format, which appeared on their packaging for the next 50-plus years.
In 1905, the prototype offering of their new No. 8 crayon box (with eight crayons) featured a copy from the side of the medal with an eagle on it. This was changed to the other side of the medal with the 1904 date on it in Roman numerals.
Binney & Smith purchased the Munsell Color Company crayon product line in 1926, and inherited 22 new colors, 11 in the maximum and 11 in the middle hue ranges. They retained the Munsell name on products such as “Munsell-Crayola” and “Munsell-Perma” until 1934, and then incorporated their colors into their own Crayola Gold Medal line of boxes.
In 1939, Crayola, by combining its existing crayon colors with the Munsell colors, introduced its largest color assortment product to date; a "No. 52 Drawing Crayon 52 Color Assortment", which was retired by the 1944 price list.
In 1949, Crayola introduced the "Crayola No. 48" containing 48 color crayons in a non-hangable floor box.
Further expansion took place in 1958 with the introduction of the 64-color pack that included the company's first crayon sharpener built into the box. The 64-color box was called "a watershed" moment in the history of the Crayola crayon by Smithsonian National Museum of American History curator David Shayt.
The corporation became a publicly traded company under the symbol BYS on the American Stock Exchange in 1963, and later moved to the New York Stock Exchange under the same symbol in 1978.
In 1977, Binney & Smith acquired the rights to Silly Putty, a stretchy, bouncy silicon rubber compound. Crayola markers were introduced in 1978 to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Crayola crayons. In 1984, the company was acquired by Hallmark Cards, a privately held corporation. Colored pencils and a line of washable markers were added in 1987.
In August 1997, Crayola collaborated with Alliance Atlantis and the entertainment arm of Hallmark Cards to release three direct-to-video adaptations of famous children's novels under the name Crayola Kids Adventures.
Crayola Crayons were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 1998. On January 1, 2007, Binney & Smith reorganized as Crayola LLC, to reflect the company's number one brand.
In 2011, My First Crayola was launched. Products include triangular crayons and flat-tipped markers.
In 2015, Crayola announced "Color Escapes" for adults to help them relieve stress. The kit includes four collections, such as geometric, garden, natural, and kaleidoscope.
The most common retail packages are multiples of eight, with 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96 and 120 packs being marketed today. A 150-crayon pack featuring a plastic telescope-like case was introduced in 2006, and includes 118 regular color crayons, 16 glitter crayons, and 16 "Metallic FX" crayons, as well as a built-in sharpener at the apex of the tower. This was succeeded by a 152-crayon set in a plastic yellow carrying case in 2013, with all the colors from the 150-crayon set plus the standard colors Piggy Pink and Blue Bell.
Red | Orange | Carnation Pink | Red Orange | Violet Red | Scarlet |
Yellow | Green | Yellow Orange | Yellow Green | Green Yellow | Cerulean |
Blue | Violet (Purple) | Blue Green | Blue Violet | Dandelion | Indigo |
Brown | Black | Red Violet | White | Apricot | Gray |
The Crayola crayon was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame as a founding member at its inception.
Crayola has been featured in segments from the popular children's shows Sesame StreetArchived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, with the official 100 billionth crayon molded by Fred Rogers himself in February 1996 at the plant in Easton.
The stamp is part of the 1900s decade sheet of the Celebrate the Century souvenir sheet series, and was designed by Carl Herrman, illustrated by Richard Waldrep and printed by Ashton-Potter USA using the Offset printing/intaglio process.
A "discovery center" was built that showcases the manufacturing process of crayons. There is also a "Crayola Hall of Fame" in which the retired crayon colors are displayed.
The Crayola Experience was featured in a Food Network episode of . A dinner was held for 150 employees of the Crayola Experience to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 64-box of crayons. Chef Michael Symon's mission was to create an eight-course tasting menu for this event, where all eight items of the menu had to match eight randomly chosen Crayola crayon colors.
On October 11, 2003, the Experience unveiled "The World's Largest Crayon", a crayon weighing , as part of its celebration of 100 years of Crayola crayons. The giant crayon, in diameter, is blue, and was made of leftover crayon bits ("leftolas") sent in by children across the United States.
It opened its first location in Two Rivers Landing, in Easton, Pennsylvania, in May 2013, its second location in The Florida Mall, Orlando, Florida, in June 2015, its third location in Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota, in February 2016, its fourth location in The Shops at Willow Bend, Plano, Texas, in March 2018, and its fifth location in Chandler Fashion Center, Chandler, Arizona, in May 2019. With five new locations planned to open by 2027, their sixth location will open in 2025 in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
In 2021, Kellogg's and Crayola teamed up to create a fruit-flavored cereal with a coloring book on the box. Kellogg's Crayola Jazzberry Cereal are rainbow-colored corn puffs, and the package included access to a digital pet in the Scribble Scrubbie Pets App.
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