Musgrave Pencil Company
100 Years of
American Heritage
When Musgrave contacted us years ago asking for a branding proposal, we knew from the moment we read the email that a client with a 100-year-old American heritage story like this doesn’t come around often.
Founded in 1916 in Shelbyville, Musgrave is one of three enduring pencil factories in the U.S. For most of its history, the company operated primarily as a manufacturer for other brands, with little public-facing identity of its own. As it approached its 100-year anniversary, Musgrave’s leadership saw an opportunity to change that and began looking ahead to its next 100 years.
Today, with more than 75 products on Musgrave’s site, including shirts, notebooks, and other stationery items designed by Studio Delger, Musgrave is a beloved brand among designers, artists, and office supply aficionados. It has become a noteworthy Tennessee-made brand featured on Magnolia TV and Garden & Gun’s “Made in the South” awards, NYTimes Wirecutter, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2021 Musgrave and Studio Delger won a prestigious Dieline award for their Variety Pack packaging.
Design: Studio Delger
Photography: Emily Dorio, Studio Delger
The factory’s bread and butter is custom pencils. Any hotel room, golf course, oyster bar, or school district with their own pencil likely got it from Musgrave. The company had already been producing several of their own designs and had a strong portfolio of reliable pencils, but they were shipped to customers in a cellophane bag. Our initial strategy was to relaunch this set of products in a more “retail-ready” way with simple, elegant packaging that pays homage to the historical designs and also looks great on a store shelf. It also helps that the company happens to own a paper box manufacturing facility next door.
During our first visit to Musgrave’s factory in Shelbyville, we were handed a cardboard box containing several photos from throughout the company’s history. Some had been reprinted over the years, and a few had been scanned and saved on a CD-ROM. Our first order of business was to scan and archive these images. We wanted to protect the history, and the images continue to help tell Musgrave’s story online, in social media, and on packaging.
We were careful not to mess with a good thing and faithfully retained all of the original character of the pencil designs the company was selling.
Over the course of our partnership, we have produced an unbelievable body of work and products for Musgrave. What they sold in total in their first year of online sales is now close to what they sell in an average week.
We’ve been lucky enough to have a seat at the table when new product lines came into being. If you’ve ever pondered, “Who gets to name the crayons,” we can’t tell you. But boy howdy, we can tell you who has named many, many pencils.
In particular, a product that really put Musgrave on the map as a pencil-lover’s favorite was the brainchild of their late president, Mike Smith.
The Tennessee Red was a brand-new product line that reintroduced pencils made from Eastern Red Cedar slats. This kind of wood is notoriously hard on the machines and tough to work with. The inconsistent grain, knotty composition, and varied color is why the wood fell out of favor decades ago in factories. Of course, all those features are why pencil lovers can’t get enough of them. They are beyond beautiful and sporadically available because they sell out so quickly, and Eastern Red Cedar can be hard to reliably source.
The Sidekick, another new product, is a laser engraved carpenter pencil made from Eastern Red Cedar, with a design motif that nods to Shelbyville’s other claim to fame, Tennessee Walking Horses, and makes a great gift for the maker in your life.
We’ve also resurrected many old product lines and materials, cleaning them up but keeping their core vibrancy and charm.
Pencil King was created from a faded impression of a design that had been lost long ago. The special ferrule (the metal part that holds the eraser) plus a purple and gold color scheme and a smooth core elevate this pencil to regal status.
We’ve designed shirts, ballcaps, bags, and more stickers than we can count to supply superfans with all the gear they could ask for.
We also keep Musgrave’s social media accounts active with new product launches, peeks into the past, and a steady stream of factory floor production clips.
