The Brand
Koh-I-Noor’s mission is to make themselves partners of innovative operators in the sector, whether they are manufacturers or dealers.
Partners of manufacturers because Koh-I-Noor’s products almost always bear the trademark of the factory that produces them, because they think that their function is to integrate the industrial product with marketing appropriate to the market in which they find themselves without replacing the industrial reality behind the product.
Reseller partners because Koh-I-Noor’s catalog is always updated with new products and new merchandise and their warehouse, with an order fulfillment service in 24 hours, is the guarantee that products are always in stock
The headquarters of Binasco, with its 8.500sqm, represents both the distribution terminal for the products of the various factories and the research and development center for new products.
Brand History
It was the need to create, the desire to turn ideas into well-defined reality, to lead the young Josef Hardtmuth in creating a writing instrument capable of producing clear signs and extremely precise details.
It was 1790. Mixing the damp clay with the graphite, Josef obtained a mass that could be easily grinded and filtered, to make it completely free from any impurities, until it was molded into a body with a very fine, stable and uniform structure. By varying the proportion of the components appropriately into the mixture, he also obtained different degrees of hardness and the same number of writing instruments capable of tracing more or less soft signs and a more or less intense black. The ceramic mine was born.
In 1850 Franz Hardtmuth, inspired by the name of the fabulous Indian diamond "Kohinur" (mountain of light), decided that the pencils of the Viennese factory would be called Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth, to stand out unmistakably from all the others. He also felt the need to distinguish the product in its external appearance: the wood that wrapped the mines, in fact, was then invariably painted black or brown. Franz decided to combine the graphite black with a bright yellow that mirrored the smooth shine of polished wood. Thus was born the famous yellow pencil.
Koh-I-Noor has remained since then, all over the world, the very symbol of professional quality in the field of design.
But this is past history. KOH-I-NOOR Italia S.p.A. was founded in 1952 as a commercial arm of the historic pencils factory. In the following years KOH-I-NOOR Italy has always been able to interpret the needs of the market both in the field of drawing and writing, launching products that have made the history of this sector: from the first ink pens of KOH-I-ink NOOR RAPIDOGRAPH of the early fifties, which revolutionized the very way to realize a technical design, to the current TOMBOW correctors, which determine the quality standard of this new generation of products.
