Standing Out From Your Competition - RD234

<h2>How are you standing out from your competition</h2> <p>What do you think of when you hear the word “pencil”?</p> <p class="p1">I bet that one of the images that flashed through your head is of a yellow-painted piece of wood with a graphite center. The quintessential yellow pencil found the world over.</p> <p class="p1">A Medium article by Melissa Gouty titled “Why Pencils Are Painted Yellow" got me thinking about the parallels between a yellow pencil and your design business.</p> <p class="p1">I'm going to paraphrase Melissa's article for the sake of my comparison.</p> <p class="p1">The common yellow pencil that we take for granted helped spark the renaissance. Before the invention of the pencil, quill and ink were the only means of writing, and they were reserved for the elite. The invention of the pencil allowed common people to record knowledge and write whenever and wherever they wanted.</p> <p class="p1">The discovery of graphite was so valuable that the English government guarded it and controlled its distribution. People took to smuggling graphite around the known world, and innovative individuals devised ways to use it for writing.</p> <p class="p1">In 1565, A Swiss man named Conrad Gessner came up with the idea of encasing graphite in wood and the pencil industry was born. This common instrument familiar to every schoolchild, which you probably have strewn around your home, was a valuable commodity back then. To own a pencil made you special.</p> <p class="p1">But like most things, time and wider availability diminished the pencil’s appeal. Over the next 300 years, the thrill of owning a pencil fizzled out. This marvellous invention was no more than a boring piece of brown wood with graphite in the middle, until 1889, that is.</p> <p class="p1">In 1889 the World Fail was held in Paris, France. It attracted more than thirty-two million visitors and showcased exhibitors from around the world.</p> <p class="p1">One exhibitor was an Austrian-Hungarian company by the name of Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth. They had