With the CRETACOLOR brand, Brevillier Urban & Sachs combines the ambition of two individualists: Carl Brevillier and Hans Wolfgang Hromatka.

In 1863, the manufacturer Carl Brevillier founded the Zeus pencil factory in Vienna, which made writing and drawing accessible to a large public. The fortune for this came from the industrial production of screws and wagons for railroads. But Carl Brevillier found his true calling in art. Since the writing tools of the time, such as nibs and pencils, were mainly handmade and mostly of poor quality and very expensive, his goal was to create high-quality tools for people who write or draw. This ultimately also made it possible to inspire those people for art who until then could not afford art materials. This was another important contribution to the development of the modern Brevillier pencil.

Since the end of the 1990s, Hans Wolfgang Hromatka has continued the tradition of this historic brand under the name CRETACOLOR. By purchasing the Hirm pencil factory in 1996, the passionate collector of old pencils succeeded in combining his passion and his field of work for the first time, thus preventing the closure of the company. Thus CRETACOLOR gradually developed into one of the premium brands for high-quality artists' products worldwide.

With the takeover of Brevillier-Urban in 2008, the company that upheld the tradition of the old Carl Brevillier pencil factory, Hans Wolfgang Hromatka acquired the know-how to produce artists' pencils even more efficiently. At his request, the name Brevillier was integrated into the CRETACOLOR brand logo. And the company Brevillier Urban & Sachs was born.