Scribe

I'm still here.

Sorry about that, guys.

Hi, Andy. Hi, Johnny. How are you guys? Hey, good to be with you again. It's been a long time.

Well, it is Internet telephone.

Consuming? Well, actually, I'm at my office today, so I was looking around for what I might actually consume besides our horrible coffee or water, and I found that. You won't believe it, but I found that we still had some of these mini bottles of Southern Home Chardonnay sitting around the office from our centennial event that we gave in gift bags for our guests up at the centennial gala. So that's what I'm drinking day. Iced Sutter Home coffee. Chardonnay. As far as reading, recently received a gift from Gail Steinbeck of her husband Thomas, late husband Thomas's book on short stories about the California Central coast called down to the Boundless Sea. So I've been enjoying that the last few days or so. Working through that. And I tend to read a lot of mostly non fiction, but it's nice to get back into the fiction mode a little bit. Yeah. Let's see what else? Tv. Last night I hit up Ozark for the first episodes on. On Netflix, which that was. Yeah, that was crazy. So I don't know. I enjoyed that first two episodes. So we'll see how it goes from here.

And let's see, what am I writing with or on? I just decided I'd pull out my trusty 211. I haven't used that for a little bit. It's getting close to the Steinbeck stage here. So I've been using that in my Summit notebook, which is what I use around the office most of the time.

Yeah, I wish I did. I'm not. I'm not any different than anybody else. And we don't really even have a manufacturer's backlog of that, believe it or not.

We typically do a small manufacturer's reserve for gifting other purposes, but I gifted a lot of them out and then, you know, we oversold versus our production run on that first on that release. So in the end we didn't end up with much of a manufacturer's reserve. So I don't even have anything to kind of give away or trade.

It's not a onesie.

When you cross over from the South Bay or the East Bay to the west, you cross some of those old salt flats. I don't know if they're still using them as much as they once did or not for production though.

Sure. Well, honestly, I've been kind of out of the loop since our centennial with some vacation time and getting off the grid. So I haven't really seen a lot of what's new out there. I know what's new with us, of course, but one thing since you did mention pens is that Caran D' Ache has a new set of, you know, their 849 mechanical pencils and pens that I always seem to like. They do a lot of different designs with them. They have a new tropical design version of those. And when I was checking those out, I saw that they also had a whole new series of YouTube video tutorials on, on using Prismalo there Prism Aquarelle pencils. That's our watercolor pencils. And it's kind of neat to see those guides. I like watching those things and trying to learn something about using colored pencils. So that's kind of it. On the outside side with that, with, you know, of course with our centennial, we took a. I took the opportunity to write a history of the company. We just published a book, the Story of Cal Cedar 100 years of pencil Supply History. I won't really get into that now because we're going to talk about the history of the company in a bit. But we did actually just raise a link. We're going to make it available for people who are. Anybody who might happen to be interested in the history in the company. So we're doing that and had just a great event over with everybody coming in from around the world. And we've finally just put that link material up on the Cal Cedar homepage for our centennial party. And it's really a pretty cool three day event with customers coming in from at least nine or ten countries around the world. Really, really exciting. We had probably at least what's interesting Here we are 100 years old and there's at least nine other companies that came and participated that were older than us. So we were just kind of the new boy joining the club. So it's kind of unique.

Interesting thing about the industry I loved

Yeah, I heard they did that afterwards. And we have a bunch of actual video also from the show, but we haven't gotten to getting through all the video. There's just a lot of content there. So I'm excited to see it. It was a great show, particularly. I think they did the Blackwing portion, not the whole event. So we had two different acts. We had Willie T. Taylor, who was Willie T. Who is our Blackwing artist, who we cut the album with a couple years ago, and he performed a couple songs. He's just a great guy. And kind of a new relationship that's developed out of the Steinbeck model when we did the 24 a couple years ago through Gail Steinbeck, Tom's wife. She has a nephew named Johnny Irion. So essentially he's what, the grand nephew of John Steinbeck, singer, songwriter, and he's married to Sara Lee Guthrie, who is Arlo's youngest daughter and the granddaughter of Woody Guthrie. We had Guthrie Steinbeck heritage. You know, they're performing for our show. They perform as a duo as well as independently recently. And we've gotten to know them through this event. It was just really great to have them and Gail join us as part of the event. And. And they opened the set with, you know, with this Land Is yous Land. It was really fun.

Really fun.

No. Cool.

did a really, really awesome job with

Yeah, we're looking for it.

now. You've got all these pencils with what grips and carve outs, like the groove for Lyra or the E grip for maybe something with some of those tech being on the sides for help for ergonomics or something. I don't know. I don't know how that would look in A vector pack though.

I'm sure there's a few silent boos out there.

Sure. So, obviously our history at Cal cedar is with the supply of cedar wood to the pencil industry. So, you know, our core business since founding in 1917 has been to produce incense cedar wood slats that are used for making pencils. Our customers all over the world, you know, some of the top brands, whether it's, you know, writing pencil or art supply pencil, artist material pencils or cosmetic pencils. In fact, cosmetics is probably one of the strongest part of the business and demand for cedar these days. Obviously, there's been a lot of change over 100 years in terms of wood supply, and incense cedar itself replaced eastern red cedar as a primary wood species about 100 years ago. Here we are another hundred years later, and other woods have come to take the more commodity, higher volume side of the business, while incense cedar is primarily the premium side of the market. So that's kind of the historical core business. Obviously, we were in the business for quite some time as a pencil manufacturing family before that. So one the family kind of split came to California and our side of the family, my grandfather acquired Cal Cedar and we built that up. So then pencils.com really started out as a promotional concept for, as part of our promotional programming in the 1990s when we were seeing a lot of competition from new species of wood coming a lot of primarily from Indonesia, rainforest hardwoods that were just being cut down, rather dramatic places and not really great for the environment. And so we wanted to position incense cedar as a renewable, continuous supply resource for the industry. So we did a lot of teacher education kits that we sent out. And pencils.com was really just an educational site from about 1995 until we decided to convert it to e commerce. It was. What happened is, bit by bit, we were getting a lot of inquiries and emails. We had done a lot of work in the 90s with promotion of cedar. And what happened is that people started sending us emails saying where are we getting. Where can we get a decent pencil? The world was commoditizing in the globalization period of the 90s and early knots and the big retailers were consolidating, they were worried about price, price, price. And the supply chain was consolidating with a lot of the pencil industry merging and price became the main issue. So we started getting a lot of inquiries about how to get, how to make good pencils or where to get find any good pencils. You know, people, some people weren't as, as used to shopping and maybe at art supply shops versus for where more variety of brands were versus office supply stores and things like that. So we decided to try and experiment with pencils.com actually before that we kind of introduced our own brand of pencils. That was the California Republic line at the Palomino and all that. Yeah, yeah. And so that kind of, that's what morphed into becoming the Palomino brand group. And you know, when we got the Blackwing brand that build up. So essentially the two parts of the business are the slat business and what we really call nowadays kind of our lifestyle brands business. What consists of the Palomino brands, our products, which have Blackwing and Forest Choice and Golden Bear, which are really the three brands of pencils that we concentrate on. The prospector brand is actually probably going by the wayside here. We're winding that one down. And the pencils.com is essentially the e commerce channel where we promote not just our own products, but wood case pencils in general and supply also pencils from a number of the people who buy slats from us and promote their brands as well. So in a sense, you know, the Blackwing and the Palomino brands is the product branded area and pencils.com is more of an educational channel. A little bit about how pencils are made as well as, you know, a place to find pencils and related products.

We originally, yeah. When we started it, you know, my vision for the, for the site at that time was to kind of create a group of forums who people were interested in writing or art or whatever. They could go and talk. You know, this was in 2007 or 8. At that time, I think Facebook was, I think it was still only open to students. I think the main social media channel was. Now, I don't even know the name of it was gone. Right.

MySpace, exactly. So. So I mean there wasn't a lot of that. But quickly you know, Facebook came around some other areas. We realized we weren't going to be a key gathering point for people interested in those things and. And sharing that. So we kind of refocused on just being the E commerce and some information.

You know, it's easier for us to use those other tools, those social media tools to promote those things and to host our own site and try to build a community that's hard enough to build a community around your own brand.

Not sure. So we've got them still. We've kind of. There's some changes in the cedar market going on. And, you know, one of the things is we've got a lot of different products and maybe not as many as a lot of other pencil companies, of course, but there's not a lot of volume there. We like it. We're trying to figure out some of that. We may be actually promoting Force choice a little bit more in the future and introducing some new items in Forest Choice, so.

So, yeah, no decisions have been. No, no clear decisions been made on any of that. Yeah, right. We're looking through those things.

Via Cal Cedar, yeah. So our supply chain probably is, you know, the historical supply chain. It's probably much different than many others now, but obviously. And since cedar is growing here in California as well as in Oregon, so historically there's been a group of sawmills. At one time we had five sawmills of our own that we produced. But with the transitions a number of years ago, we actually eliminated our own Sawmills and began to focus on purchasing lumber from other sawmills, as we always did to some degree, also in addition to our own sawmill production. So essentially the forests are privately owned or they're owned by state or federal agencies. Most of the harvesting these days is all coming off of private timberlands, although there is some federal timberlands that are, that are still harvested. It's harder and harder to get that. There's been a lot of restrictions on public harvesting, you know, going back 20 plus years now with the spotted owl. So generally what happens is that the timberland owners are deciding where they want to sell their logs or when they want to harvest their logs. They're growing their trees and then putting them on the market. Now some of the companies are integrated, they have their own timberlands as well. And some people are just simply timberland owners and they put their logs out to bid. The logs then come into the sawmill. So what's different, probably from 30 years ago, is where we specialized in incense cedar. Most of the sawmills that we buy from now are using multiple species of trees. There's six or seven different commercial conifers, generally that are harvested in California alone. And so some of these larger complex mills will have all six or seven species that they cut. And they come into the mills, they get concentrated at the log yards, and then they'll. They'll run in different sawmills or in the sawmill different runs on different species into different sets of products, depending upon what the species is and what the use for those species are. In terms of incense cedar, we have beyond the incense seeder for pencils, the incense seeder is also used for fencing products, for siding and decking products, some commercial products, as well as occasionally some millwork and specialty timbers. So there are other competing uses for the incense cedar. And so that drives how, depending upon the log diameter and the log grade, what yields out of that, out of each individual tree. So it's quite an operations research issue to get through to what products come out of that. But generally incense cedar, maybe if we were cutting it because we're primarily in the pencil mill pencil business, we would try to optimize for a maximization of pencil stock. Whereas other mills are more focused on, on the highest value, total return out of the log. Sometimes that's not just in heavy to pencil. So basically we have competition that we have to pay for essentially in cedar for, you know, to, to make, you know, to determine how they're going to cut that log. So there's a lot of different products that come out of that. And the cedar is essentially dried and dry kilns. After the 3 by 3 squares are cut, the pencil stock, what we call pencil squares, is essentially a three 80 millimeter by 80 millimeter. It's about three and a quarter inch square by random lengths, but usually from eight feet to up to 16ft or so. And that material, once it's dried, is then put across a green chain where it's kind of graded and then pulled to grade and length and packaged into units where it can then be loaded in containers. Historically. Now this is what's changed in the last 15, 17 years. We used to have our slat factory located here in Stockton. And so the lumber would come down to Stockton and we'd make the pencil slats here in Stockton. But we had to relocate the facility to our Tianjin China operation. We made that decision around 2000, at the late 2000 and 2001 started production. And by 2002 we were doing all of our production in our Tianjin China slat factory. So the lumber is actually loaded on containers now, the pencil squares sent to by ocean over to our Tianjin facility. And from there at the slat factory, the lumber is cut down to blocks and then into slats and then further graded, sorted, finished with stain and treat and added wax additives to improve sharpenability and then shipped off to from there when it's packaged to the finished slats. There's quite a variety of products of plies and widths, both in widths and lengths and grades that go to customers. And our, you know, our job really is to get that to the right product to the right customer. There's many customers want only the wide ply. Some are willing to take narrow ply because it ends up being a lower wood cost, but it's less efficient from a labor contact standpoint. So the western manufacturers in Europe generally in the US generally want the widest supply material in order to have maximum efficiency through their productions. And most of the narrow reply ends up in Asia somewhere. And from there it's produced into the pencil. So if it's going into one of our products, obviously it goes to for our Palomino and our Blackwing products, the premium products, we go, we ship the slats to Japan. We have a warehouse there where we service a number of our customers. And as we need products, we give a forecast commitment for the year to our suppliers there and work with them on our programs. They produce the pencils, send them back to us, and we tip them and pack them here in Stockton and California at this point we've been looking, we actually ordered a printer because we're going to start doing some custom imprints. So we'll be doing maybe a little more value added here in Stockton in the future. So that's going to be something that we're excited about. But that machinery is not here yet. Hopefully just getting started with that later this year. But our other customers around the world, they're in Europe, they're in Japan, they're in north and South America, they're throughout Asia, and they're producing their products or products. You know, in the cosmetics arena, none of the cosmetics brands themselves actually make pencils. They're all made by companies that are in the pencil industry that specialize in cosmetics. They actually develop most of the formulations for the cores themselves and provide. And the innovation really comes from those companies selling to the brands. And the brands are essentially marketing companies in the cosmetics arena in terms of coloring pencils and things like that. You know, most of the big brands are manufacturing themselves, though. More and more of that stuff is jobbed out to other, you know, OEM type producers. So when you look at the whole supply chain, you know, companies. There's a number of companies now that have a brand of pencil, but aren't manufacturers themselves. That's. That would be ourselves, I guess, in terms of pencils. But yeah, many other. Many other people that aren't even involved in the industry decided they want to offer a pencil. So they're. They're going out to other people to manufacture on OEM basis for them.

Yeah.

Yeah. There's a Musgrave does some. And you know, I know, I think Baron Fig is getting theirs from. I know where they're coming from, but I don't want. I guess I don't want to say so.

Sure.

Sure. Actually, it's kind of interesting, you know, in writing this book, the Story of Cal Cedar, 100 years of pencil Supply History, which is a bit of misnomer because our family started in the pencil industry in Germany in 1855. So we actually have over 160 years in the pencil industry overall. And then, you know, started with a company called Berolsheimer or Nilfelter, quickly found that the US market was growing, opened a US sales office and, you know, developed a brand called Eagle. And eventually Berlsheim and Ilfelder, you know, ceased production in Germany and moved to New York. And the company became Eagle Pencil company and the other partners, the non Berolzheimer partners, were bought out. The wood that was used was eastern red cedar. It grows primarily in the southeast, Juniperus virginiana. And that was considered the primary wood for pencils. But it was getting used up as more and more demand, the global economy grew, populations grew. It was getting exported to Europe, it was getting used in the US and pencils were being produced. And, you know, for about 80 or 100 years or so, it was considered the pencil wood. It was basically, in fact, another word for eastern red cedar was pencil wood. And as supplies got tighter and prices went up, so people started looking for substitutes. And that's where the California story kind of comes in. And here again, 100 years later, we're kind of seeing the same thing. So Eagle, you know, started looking at the western species of conifers. Incense cedar proved to be probably the best substitute at that time, and in many cases, better technically. And they started the first slat factory in California in San Leandro. So that was actually started by our family, but it was Eagle Pencil Company under their Hudson Lumber. And they then started proving that there was demand or a quality product that could be made. And then everybody in the industry jumped in and followed the wood to California. And within a matter of 25 or 30 years, there were 10 or 12 pencil slat factories in California and Oregon and California cedar. The founders of California Cedar were people who had lumber industry experience in California, the Thurmans. W.B. thurman was from Madera, which actually means wood in Spanish. There's a town here in the Central Valley, further south. His father had been a lumberman who had actually founded the town. Interesting. W.B. thurman had been a. Had been a sheriff of the Madera county and following in his father's footsteps a little bit, but then was shot by, in an escape effect. This is like 1898 or something. Was shot by somebody trying to escape from the jail. And he quickly resigned. You know, I guess he hurt his hand or something. It wasn't Too serious. But he decided, this isn't for me, and he went back to the lumber business. And so by 1915 or so, you know, we found a lot of literature in like magazines and things like that that showed what was the interest in cedar and the growing interest in things, you know, related to timberland, timber magazines and things like that, looking on the Internet. And so incense cedar proved its way. And Cal Cedar got founded in 1970 by Thurman and another guy from San Francisco who was a big trumper and big trader of sugar pine. And so the two of them built the business up for about seven years before we bought it. In fact, we actually were competing with Dixon and another company to buy Cal Cedar. You know, by that time our family had had a little split up after three generations and the eastern side of the family stayed in New York and continued to own Eagle. And we came out to California, my grandfather, and bought California cedar. So now you look at 100 years old later or 90 years later, where things go, where the opportunity is. So people, the industry moved from Europe to the U.S. because there was a growing market in the U.S. there was abundant resources, There were graphite supplies. And now, you know, come the 1990s, you start seeing the China open up and you see increasing production and investment in China for pencils and a lot of new woods coming in from there, as well as large deposits of graphite in China being used to make pencils. So I think in a way, certain things don't change. You know, you look a hundred years and you still have the same competitive factors, whether it's duty issues were an issue that were being faced. One of the things, you know, we have the anti dumping duties here in the United States since 1995 against Chinese pencils. Well, the U.S. was the Germans had duties against U.S. pencils, you know, 100 years ago. So it's kind of interesting to see how things change, but they don't in many ways. There were a lot of common themes over a hundred years in the industry. Obviously brands come and go. Like you mentioned, Ebar, Faber, Blackwing disappeared and a lot of the companies consolidated and eventually here in California, you know, California cedar became. And Hudson were the last two remaining slat manufacturers until 1998. We acquired their assets and were the last producer of incense cedar slats in California when we moved the plant to China. Now fortunately, we're still using incense cedar, but we use, you know, two or three other species. We have another western species in California that grows in California white fir that we use. And we're using some poplar species now as well.

Yeah, well, the most popular species. I mean there's a lot, there's a lot of different popular species around the world. But it's used quite commonly in India. It's increasing increasingly. Most of the pencils in China, Chinese pencils are made with poplar these days, less with basswood. Basswood is actually been over harvested. There've been a lot of restrictions placed on basswood. Most of the basswood that is coming in the market is coming from Russia and some of that has questionable, you know, provenance these days. So we've actually kind of de. Emphasized that material in our, in our supply chain over the last few years. So what products we offer.

So the volumes and concept came from, you know, Grant Christensen and Alex Poirier in our Blackwing, you know, in our team and our branded group team. I've actually haven't had much to do with it. In fact, out of nine issues, they haven't accepted one of my ideas yet for volumes. And you know, I, you know, I don't want to force my hand. I like to let the creativity flow from, from the team. But so obviously it's something that takes some time. There have been, there have been Times when, you know, even, even with our experience and relationships, there's been a lot of things going on in the industry that kind of impacted our, how quickly we could get some. There is quite a bit of lead time, you know, with the product coming in from Japan. There are times of year that our suppliers are busy or than others. And so when you're trying to do a new pencil every four, three months or so, you know, sometimes you're running up against that. We have the color change, the coloring trend that impacted things. So generally we start trying to, I decide nowadays we've tried, we try to decide what the next four issues will be about a year in advance or so. So we're always trying to work quite, quite a way, quite a ways out with ideas. And then the other thing is you run into issues or challenges. Maybe you have a technical issue in the production that delays things or that or a rights issue. When you're trying to do something, particularly when you're trying to partner with somebody about, you know, that that's got some, you know, name rights or things like that. Obviously something with the Steinbecks was a relationship that took time to build. Right. And so some of those things, you know, some, some of those things are in the works for a lot longer. You think you're going to do them earlier. They take. And you have to be ready for the, with the next thing. So there's been some, I can, I can tell you there's been some times where we're air freighting pencils, getting them here just in time and getting them just enough to do whatever we need for the subscriptions to get out on the base. And there's been a few times where we've been, you know, two or maybe even one time three weeks later than our original target date. So yeah, it's, even with our experience, it's, it's a challenge.

Yeah, there's, there's a lot of factors. So, but, but I, you know, I've got to credit the team. They do, they work really hard. Everybody pulls together. When we're right up against the wire. There's, you know, everybody's in there packing and, and, and pulling things together. It's a big team effort and, and you know, some, some of the ideas, you know, there's a lot of different ideas that get thrown out and, and I don't even know what most of them are probably. But you know, I usually, I, I kind of know one or two in advance what they're going to Be.

Yeah, I don't know about plan C. I guess that would be really good planning. I guess we're getting better at planning. So we're okay at planning now or we're, you know, but. But I think, you know, it's been more comfortable and we've been, you know, it's also the other thing that's. Is, you know, is you're increasing the number of subscribers. You're. We're increasing the number of dealers. Yeah. And so the, you know, the amount that we might produce in any given run is a challenging thing to judge because, you know, how popular do we think that's going to be? You know, how many, how many are we going to sell through this? Obviously, we know what the subscriptions are, but more and more of the volume, and the majority of the volume actually goes through our, our dealer network. You know, we know what we're, you know, and we always have a reserve for pencils.com, what we think we're going to sell, you know, ourselves directly and all that. So I've definitely been. So we try to plan those. We try to plan those generally to run out of stock and close out before the next one releases. Yeah, and part of that is with the dealers, you know, they don't want too many different pencils on. On their shelves.

Yeah, we're excited about that. It gives us a touch point every quarter to come back to them with a new item and follow up with them about reorders and things like that. So it's really been a big help in creating and telling new stories all the time and keeping. We don't talk so much about the historic story of the original Blackwing 602. And obviously we did that a lot going forward. But now more and more we're talking about the new creators and the new partnerships that we're developing with people and things like that.

So the. In terms of the concepts for each story, basically we're telling a series of stories, right? And I think the common theme around those is around, you know, creativity and expression generally and different forms of it. But when we talk about things like the Silk Road, one, the theme there was really, even though it was about the sharing and the spreading of ideas, because the Silk Road was a way that the east and the west came together. Another reason why the Silk Road, you know, why that came. We've been getting a lot of inquiries or questions from, you know, our foreign dealers. We have quite a bit of dealers and distributors now in Europe and Japan and Korea and around the world, Australia. And they're asking for some themes that aren't always just US based. Right. So that was actually our first attempt to do something that had a more international flavor to it as well. And it was kind of the concept of. Of the, you know, the creativity or the sharing of ideas and spreading of ideas on the Silk Road. The jade concept, James, came through with, you know, being one of the traded commodities, I guess, and something that would lead, you know, that kind of fit in with the design concept and, you know, so the number and the story and, you know, the number that. In terms of what volume number, that's kind of all usually probably the last thing that's decided, you know, what are we going to number this one, this thing? Sometimes we'll go. We may even know what the theme is and the general design is. And we'll go through, you know, they'll be talking about two or three different volume numbers to assign to it. That's kind of the last part of the story.

Yeah. So the gold, you know, the Gold Rush one was really more about the concepting to the Eureka moment, you know, of the moment of inspiration. Maybe it didn't come through as well and you know, because we chose 5, 30 and which is the historical marker for Sutter's Mill and all that. So you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, we'd like to do more with people. We have some in, in mind. You know, it's honoring different people. But we just, we, you know, we want to try to be, we want some diversity of ideas there. We don't just want it always to be the same, you know, the same thing. A new person every time.

21124 and the 73 we just did,

So I think obviously the 211, I argued for more production there, but we didn't do it. So you know, it tells the story. The John Muir story I think, you know, was, was interesting. Obviously, you know, one of my personal interest is natural history and the history of natural history. I do a lot of collecting and reading about, of old books on natural history, illustration by naturalists and things like that. I've read a bit about, about Muir and I'm a member of the board of regents here at the University of Pacific where the John Muir center is so partnering with them on doing the Muir story. And when I found, you know, when we saw that map of where the John Muir Trail, how it, how it, you know, how it overlaid against the growing range of incense cedar was kind of a real interesting fit. And doing that, doing the laser etched slat, we're doing the story on that with the map was kind of a cool add on idea that one of the, one of the people in the company came up with at the time. And so that was, it was kind of, it was kind of fun to do that one. And obviously as California Cedar Products Co. Just showing that natural product, that's got to be my favorite. The Steinbeck is really nice. I just like the all black that I probably would have preferred an all kind of a matte black myself. I really like our standard traditional, what you call the MMX in terms of a matte black over the glossier black. But I think it was a nice call. And it was really Tom Steinbeck, John's son, who gave us, you know, the design guidelines for that and what the pencil he thought would be most favored by his father based on what he knew about his father's writing ritual and things like that. So just, you know, that what that's led to in terms of a relationship with, you know, unfortunately Tom passed away, but with Gail and now with Johnny and Sara Lee and things like that, it's just been, it's been really special. So it's been, you know, I love the product and obviously that was our, I think that was our first edition with this extra firm lead. And so that, that went, that went well. And then just the natural, the Tahoe story, you know, that's. I just doing this. We've been thinking about this special textured finish that we put on this, where we put the topography of the lake bottom on it and how to use that technology in some releases in the past. And it was, it was nice to finally bring that concept into the, into the design of the pencil, the color and just, and the fact that we timed it with our, our centennial party in Tahoe was great and we did a nice little collaboration with the league to save Lake Tahoe and keep Tahoe blue with that. So those are, those are the three that I, you know, I'm most connected to. I like the, I like the pencils themselves. I guess each of them uses a different core. So.

And, and you know, in terms of how we choose what core we're doing to some degrees, I guess, you know, deep space, deep, deep water. Both of those, the 1138 and the 73 were the two that have used the MMX type core, the super soft and so, you know, and the gold or a metallic thing using the other. So, you know, we don't want to use the same one every time. And we know that some people have their favorites and probably least often is going to be the softest lead because, you know, that's not the most popular of all the leads necessarily from everybody. Yeah.

The 1138 was the first edition where we did the roll on imprint process. Right. And that, you know, that the lineup and we've used that a couple other times on the jade since, you know, versions and it's hard to get that lineup and we actually went back and forth. It's kind of funny the conversations. As picky as the Japanese are on quality, when we go back to them and talk to them about things and say we want to reject this or that, they say we're the pickiest customer they have. So, so, you know, there's been times where, there's been times where we've actually just been forced to accept something that we really didn't want to release. We hate to do that but you know, we didn't want to miss the addition altogether. So you know, there are some ideas or some concepts for some things we want to do. But I just, I can't tell you, I don't know specifically what they all are these days in terms of them. But I guess, you know, the simpler the design obviously the easier, the easier they are. If it's a pretty much a straight lacquering job with some sort of, you know, a variety of finish, those are, those are the easiest when you start getting into some sort of printing or this other type of process. Like with this new process that we used on the, with the texture.

And you know, you, there's textures that are on things like the grip pencils and I've seen some pencils from, from Faber Castell that don't have the grip, the dots but also have similar kind of layered on materials. So there's probably some other ideas and thoughts we've had. But I, you know, I actually don't even know what's in the work with respect to those.

Right now.

Well, thank you.

It's in discussion, but undecided.

All I can say. His comment is that there are lobbying groups in different camps on that, so the decisions haven't been made.

I don't know.

No, I'll let you figure that out.

The next one I think people are gonna like.

It's gonna have something, you know, it's gonna have something different we've never done before. So.

And in. In a. In a volumes edition. So I think. I think people are gonna like it, but we'll see.

I like the story of it, too. So this one's. This one's been one that's been in the works for a while. So it'll be. It'll be interesting. We're excited about it for September.

I'd like to say that 100% were, but no, they're not. Okay. Our policy is to, you know, have as much of our production certified or not. Generally when we take a new species on, that is a priority. But just in terms of incense cedar, the way the incense cedar and the forest land ownership and stewardship that goes on throughout the growing range with different ownership blocks and interest, you have some managers and owners that are committed to FSC and some that are committed to sfi and some are just saying we have good enough laws in place. We already have the highest standards in California and Oregon around the world in terms of. Of harvest policies and management policies, and those are good enough. So we obviously can't do 100% certified in all of our cedar products product line, or we Wouldn't get enough cedar to supply the market. It's tight enough as it is today because of a lot of. There's actually been some new changes in the market because of the droughts out here in the last four or five years. The, particularly the pine, the ponderosa pine trees have been stressed and they've had some. You know, there's been various trees in the Central California region. Probably if you've gone to Lake Tahoe, you might see trees dying off and things like that. Now we have a infestation in California of the pine bark beetle, which is rapidly attacking a lot of the trees. And timberland owners, in order to manage, you know, to address that issue, are filing for emergency timber harvest permits. And as a result of that, when they get those granted, they really can only go in. They're kind of going in to a piece of property that might. They may not had plans. It wasn't going to be in the rotation cutting cycle for another 10 or 15 years. But they need to get salvaged what value they can. So they go in and they're only allowed to take the affected species. That means they're leaving cedar in the forest and some of the other species in the forest. So that's all impacting cedar supply right now. So, you know, as much as I'd love to say Will, you know, we'd only have FSC or PESC or sfi, which is kind of the global umbrella for or the local umbrella for pefc, which is kind of a global umbrella for other certification programs. We can't get it all. In fact, you know, these days, some days I think we ought to be going out and buying some logs from some people in their house, you know, where they want to take a tree down in their yard. We'll take them where we can get them. These days, obviously those lands aren't going to be certified lands in terms of the new species. When we add a poplar species or the white fur. The white fir program is an FSC program that we've added that's just coming into the market now. And we're actually going to begin to see because of the shortage on cedar that's happening and some price increases that are going to happen on cedar pencils, we're going to start to see some changes, you know, down the road here in the pencils, in some of the pencils that have been using incense cedar around the industry for quite some time and shifts into substitution into new species, which is unfortunate. I don't want to get into any particular brands and how they're going to deal with it. But we know it's coming and mainly it's because of the supply issue. That's probably. We should see some recovery in the next two to three years after they go through these harvest cycles. But the other species that we have is in the poplar program that we're putting together. It's actually a plantation poplar in China. And that's all an FSC certified program that we're working on. Pretty much the other species we try to make sure are FSC certified. The little basswood. We do. We have some FSC and we have some that's not fsc. And we're slowly phasing that program out with these others in mind. Plus we have a couple other species we're working on. We're always trying to work on something and have something down the road, but we think basswood's kind of done for us going forward. It's still being used, but I'm not sure that we're not too. We're pretty concerned about the reliability of that and whether it's compliant with all the low. Even the local regulations in a lot of cases.

Well, I think I hinted to that earlier that we are thinking about some changes that would actually. That would actually bring some new Forest Choice products in. And we do want to build that up a bit. And so we haven't made any of the clear decisions on that. Exactly.

One thing we're looking at is maybe a triangular version. I don't know how people feel about triangular pencils, but you know how I

Yeah. So. So, you know, that is one area that we're looking at doing a force choice. We do have round force choice in the color packs, but not. Not in a. Not in a written pencil.

And the other. The other thing is we have another. We do have a new notebook coming out in Force Choice, which we're actually pretty excited about, is another partnership with the University of Pacific and the John Muir center. And we've been collaborating with them. It's kind of a content included journal. It's the John Muir observer journal. And what? Yes, and it'll be coming out this fall when we just completed production. It's getting ready to ship on the water now. The University of Pacific has the John Muir center where they do a lot of education about Muir. In fact, you know, the library, the Special Collections Library at Holt Atherton Library at University Pacific has about 70 or 80% of the original journals and papers and letters of John Muir. The family descendants of John Muir went to this university and decided to donate and provide those properties to the university in safekeeping. And they're used. You know, people come from around the world actually to study those papers. I know. I know somebody, given my history, my interest in natural history. I know somebody wrote a pic, wrote a book on Alexander von Humboldt in the last couple of years, came and researched those things at the library there because Muir was influenced by Humboldt. So anyway, we've worked with the team at Pacific to develop a notebook that's going to have about 16 pages of content, original content from, you know, excerpts of journal writings, drawings, some historical information, some letters, some things like that. And the idea is to influence people to become a mere observer and to, you know, record the world around them in writing in the journal the way that Muir did. And they're planning to use it with. As part of their orientation with their inbound freshmen. And we think this is going to be an exciting product to help us build a little more retail distribution for the Forest Choice brand by getting that product out there.

I don't know how we call that. Palomino Blackwing, Forest Choice.

I don't know how the branding would work like that. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe a. Maybe a. Maybe a palomino quality without a, you know, Japanese.

gonna make it a green black wing Ferrell. Okay. Kind of like the. One of my favorite Japanese pencils is the Tombow 8900, which. That's the green pencil with the. Yeah, they call it. Yeah, I think they call it a touching, a retouching pencil or something like that.

It's got this M grade imprint on it. Says Micro Crystallite or something like that. Who knows what. Who knows what that is?

No. I appreciate, as always, the opportunity to, you know, to talk with you guys and share a little bit about the company. It's, you know, it's been a fun road the last, I guess, especially the last seven years since introducing the Blackwing. We're always trying to do some new things. We do our best at listening to people out there and feedback and input. You know, whether it's ideas for releases or feedback on product. I know the point, you know, the point guard we released recently, you know, we had some concerns about that based on that were expressed and we on this, on the next production run, we made some adjustments there and we think it improved the product quite a bit. So. And we. That was the same, same thing when we introduced the original, the Palomino Blackwing. You know, we had some people who were asking for something that was more reminiscent of the original 602 in terms of firmness and design. And so, you know, I think it was. It was only about six, eight months later that we got the next. The next item out this, you know, R602 version. So we try to do what we can there to listen. You know, sometimes. Sometimes we think they're good ideas. Sometimes we think, oh, gosh,

Yes.

So I appreciate that and I appreciate, you know, when I can get a chance or, you know, I tend to go on binges when it's social media, so it's not all the time, but I'll see some conversation in the erasable podcast group and feel like add a little value there or not, or maybe just drive people nuts. But as always, I can get a bit too detailed. But anyway, I'm excited about the fact that we've reached 100 years here. You don't get here without a lot of hard work and support. And we're kind of relying on the success of the past. But you have to continue to innovate and, you know, keep the values that you've had dear and keep that as a core of what you do. So we appreciate, you know, we appreciate all of our customers, whether they're in the slat business or our retail dealers or those who are fans of our and you know, of the end products and appreciate what you guys do to, you know, spur the interest in pencils.

So personally, I am not too active these days. I, I have at C Barrels, but both at Instagram and Twitter, I Rarely tweet anything. Sometimes I retweet something. But I do post some photographs every now and then. Either something about when I'm on some of my travels or something like that. And we have, I have, you know, historically I have the Timberlines blog blog that was on blog stock. We've actually been in the process of migrating that over to the Cal Cedar website. So Timberlines blog was actually. Timberlines was actually the original name of our company newsletter. So when I chose that as our blog name some years ago was really taking something that would had been our internal newsletter, company newsletter. And so we've actually now under the blogs most of the content has been at least all the written content. Some more personal stuff didn't go over but stuff that's related to the company and the industry has gone over. I posted today a first day summary of our centennial events and all the galleries are up now with photos of the centennial events. And over the next couple of days we'll be seeing a couple more posts that finish out kind of just telling more the detail of what happened during our, our centennial event. We've got some fun stuff that came out of that and we still have some content from the centennial and the history that we'll be sharing, you know, over the, over the blog over the next six months or so, 20 years out. Our actual centennial 100th birthday is December 14th. That was the, that was the date on which our, our, our company, the first shares were interested in, you know, were issued. And that shows it our stock records book. So that happens to be the day we're gonna have our board of directors meeting, our annual Christmas party. And, and so we're gonna make it a birthday party too. And that'll be a little more private affair just for you know, the employees and shareholders and, and director and the directors of the company.

Thank you. Good night.