The name came later than the company.

Crayola is a brand of an industrial colour business. English Wikipedia says the company behind it, Binney & Smith, was founded by Edwin Binney and Harold Smith, and that its early products were colourants for industry, including red iron oxide pigments used in barn paint and carbon black used to colour tyres. The National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York, describes Binney & Smith in the same terms, as “makers of familiar red barn paint”.

The move towards schools came at the turn of the century. Wikipedia says the firm added slate school pencils in 1900, moved into chalk, incorporated in 1902 after starting out as a partnership, and introduced a marking crayon called Staonal that year. The Strong says that, hearing teachers complain about poor-quality chalk, the company adapted a black grease pencil used to mark containers into multicoloured wax sticks, and lists the first colours as black, brown, orange, violet, blue, green, red and yellow.

Both sources credit the name to Alice Binney, Edwin’s wife, whom Wikipedia describes as a former schoolteacher. The museum says she combined the French word for chalk, craie, with a word for oily, and Wikipedia gives the same derivation, from craie and “oleaginous”. Wikipedia dates the Crayola line of wax crayons to 10 June 1903, and The Strong says Crayola crayons entered the market in 1903, sold at a nickel a box. Wikipedia adds that the company launched not with one box but with a full line, and that by 1905 it offered boxes in many sizes and assortments, some with colour names printed on the wrappers.

Colour names that changed with the times.

The crayon box has carried the brand’s identity through its colour names as much as through any logo. The Strong tracks how new shades followed fashion and culture: Burnt Sienna and Salmon after the First World War, Aquamarine in the 1960s, Atomic Tangerine and Laser Lemon in the 1970s and 1980s, and names such as Macaroni and Cheese, Outer Space and Tickle Me Pink in the 1990s. The museum also records renamings: Prussian Blue became Midnight Blue, the colour called Flesh became Peach in 1962, and Indian Red became Chestnut in 1999.

Box formats became part of that story too. Wikipedia says Binney & Smith bought the crayon line of the Munsell Color Company in 1926 and folded its colours into its own range, that a box of 48 arrived in 1949, and that a box of 64 with a built-in sharpener followed in 1957. It quotes David Shayt, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, calling the 64-colour box a watershed in the history of the Crayola crayon.

Colour retirements have themselves become brand events. Wikipedia says Crayola announced on 31 March 2017 that Dandelion would be retired, and on 14 September 2017 named its replacement Bluetiful, a blue linked to experiments at Oregon State University. It adds that Crayola brought Dandelion back in 2026. The range has also grown well beyond crayons: Wikipedia says markers arrived in 1978, the year of the crayon’s 75th anniversary, and coloured pencils and washable markers in 1987. Wikipedia also records a 1997 tie-in with Hallmark’s entertainment arm and Alliance Atlantis, three direct-to-video adaptations of children’s novels released as Crayola Kids Adventures, and the launch in 2011 of My First Crayola, a line with triangular crayons and flat-tipped markers.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are classic toy names: drawing boards, building sets, craft kits and construction toys that many families have known across more than one generation. Toy brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names still run by the company that started them to labels that have passed through several owners, and to marks that are licensed out to other manufacturers for years at a time.

A toy brand’s identity is usually carried less by any single product than by a name, a logo, a box and a handful of colours, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its manufacturing or licensed the mark to someone else. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, who makes the toy today and where it is made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners and licensees over time, where its toys are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a listed company to a Hallmark subsidiary.

Ownership has changed once in the brand’s modern history. English Wikipedia says Binney & Smith became a publicly traded company on the American Stock Exchange in 1963 and moved to the New York Stock Exchange in 1978, and that in 1984 it was acquired by Hallmark Cards, a privately held company. Hallmark has owned the business since 1984. Wikipedia says Binney & Smith reorganised as Crayola LLC on 1 January 2007 to reflect its main brand, and that the company is headquartered in Forks Township, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley.

The portfolio reaches past art supplies. Wikipedia says Binney & Smith acquired the rights to Silly Putty in 1977, and that Crayola also sells a line of artists’ paints and brushes under the Portfolio Series name.

On manufacturing, Wikipedia says most Crayola crayons are made in the United States, lists plants in Forks Township and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and in Mexico City, and says the coloured pencils are made by Faber-Castell in Brazil. The brand also has a public face in its home region: Wikipedia says the Crayola Experience, which began as the Crayola Factory, sits at Two Rivers Landing in Easton, Pennsylvania, and that the company opened Crayola Experience locations from May 2013, later adding sites in Florida, Minnesota, Texas and Arizona.

The museum world has recognised the crayons. The Strong lists Crayola Crayons as inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998.

For a design guide, Crayola shows how a colour company can make its product’s own names into a brand voice: every shade carries a label, and renamings and retirements become public moments. Compare its stablemate in our Silly Putty brand guidelines and a fellow creative-play classic in our Play-Doh brand guidelines. For this guide we use box yellow, box green and crayon orange with a rounded display sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Crayola’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.