Pencil shop Caroline: how a New Yorker turned a childhood dream into a successful but strange business

Once, a New Yorker Caroline Weaver woke up in the morning and decided to change her life. After quitting her hated job, she made a "jump to nowhere." The girl opened the pencil shop, which she dreamed of since childhood. That came out of it is said in the video of the publication "Voice of America".

Retired at 24

On the outskirts of Chinatown in New York, there is an unusual store selling exclusively pencils. The owner of the shop - Caroline Weaver - loves them since childhood. Once, one of the school friends joked, saying that retired Caroline will be able to get the job of her dreams - a seller in a pencil shop.

After graduating from school, the girl moved to New York and found a job "which she hated with all my heart." Waking up one morning, she decided to try something different. “It turns out that I became a retiree at 24,” joked Caroline.

Jump to nowhere

Caroline opened a business without even a business plan. Her idea is so unusual that it was impossible to go to the library and collect books on this market segment. Thus, the girl made a leap into nowhere.

Today, her pencil shop is already five years old, according to New York, it is a long-lived business, the source said.

In Caroline's shop there are pencils for all sizes - including gigantic ones, the size of a man, and for purposes such as miniature pencils for artists.

True connoisseur

It turns out that you can talk for hours about stationery, especially if your interlocutor is a real connoisseur, like Caroline. She has many stories to tell about pencils.

The girl even wrote a book about the history of the pencil, which was translated into Japanese and published in Tokyo.

According to Caroline, a pencil is the perfect object. You don't need to have any special skills to use it. “Pencils need to be sharpened, they have a special smell. They give a special feeling to our fingers, from their contact with the paper - a special sound, ”she said, adding that the pencil cannot be improved.

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The showcases in this pencil shop will definitely appeal to Instagram lovers: the multicolored sticks in the glasses seem to be specially arranged in such a way as to attract attention. It would seem that they are ordinary pencils, but Caroline also finds here how to interest the buyer. She said that yellow is the proprietary know-how of the Czech brand Koh-I-Noor. “At the end of the XNUMXth century, they produced the highest quality pencils. When they showed this yellow pencil at the Chicago World's Fair, all American manufacturers rushed to copy. That's why almost all pencils in the US are now yellow, ”she explained.

Caroline also told the story of the unusual brand Carand'ache. “There was such a famous political cartoonist. His pseudonym was the Russian word "pencil". He Frenchified this word, and in honor of him the Swiss company came up with its name, "- said Caroline.

The most democratic expression tool

The client, unsure of their talents, the owner of the shop invites you to sit at the table and draw. She explains what kind of pencils are and which one is better to use for your purposes. After all, not all pencils are the same. For example, there are those that dissolve in water, in which case Caroline recommends using a brush to paint. There are also soft Japanese calligraphy pencils, this one has a thick rod, so illustrators often choose it.

This little shop even has a display case of antique pencils detailing each one. Here are pencils on strings, which were used in the 1940s at polling stations. “To prevent the electorate from accidentally taking away the written inventory, it was tied to the voting booth,” the video says.

Today in the Caroline shop you can find a lot of different pencils: coated with a material with a special texture, decorated with platinum caps, pencils with a built-in sharpener and others. However, no matter how hard they try to decorate this product, the pencil remains the most democratic instrument of self-expression. Perhaps for this reason, there are always visitors to Caroline's shop.