The Art of Carrying
RIMOWA and Faber-Castell turn the travelling case into a portable atelier, where centuries of German craftsmanship meet the future of making.
Some journeys begin with a destination. Others begin with a line.
A pencil touches paper, a mark is made, and suddenly a place exists before the traveller has even arrived. The sketchbook has always been a peculiar kind of luggage: light enough to carry anywhere, yet capable of transporting an entire world. With the limited-edition RIMOWA × Faber-Castell Artist Case, that idea becomes physical. An anodised aluminium case opens to reveal a travelling collection of Polychromos artists’ coloured pencils—a portable studio in which the language of luggage meets the language of drawing.
It is an object about movement, but also about permanence.
The collaboration is compelling because neither house is new to the problem of making an object survive its journey. RIMOWA was founded in Cologne in 1898 by Paul Morszeck, whose first workshop stood on Bechergasse, close to the city’s cathedral. What began as a saddlery business evolved into the manufacture of travelling cases, initially using leather-covered plywood and cardboard for travelling professionals.
The transformation of the suitcase into a modern industrial object came with a transformation in the nature of travel itself. The twentieth century was making the world smaller. Railways had already altered European mobility; aviation was about to alter it again. Luggage could no longer simply be a box in which possessions were stored. It had to become engineered equipment: lighter, stronger, more resistant, increasingly designed around the physical realities of movement.
RIMOWA’s answer was aluminium.
In 1937, the company pioneered its first aluminium suitcase. Thirteen years later, in 1950, came the parallel grooves that would become inseparable from its identity. RIMOWA states that the grooves were inspired by the golden age of aviation and the first all-metal aircraft, turning an engineering solution into a visual signature.
The distinction matters. Great industrial design often begins with necessity and ends as culture. A rib strengthens a surface; eventually it becomes an icon. A material is selected because it performs; eventually it becomes synonymous with a particular idea of modernity.
RIMOWA understood this unusually well.
Its cases became associated with the traveller not merely because they carried possessions, but because they came to signify a certain relationship with movement: purposeful, international, precise. The suitcase became part of the visual vocabulary of modern life.
Faber-Castell began its story much earlier.
Its origins date to 1761, when cabinet maker Kaspar Faber established the business in Stein, Bavaria. More than a century later, the company would become one of the most influential names in the history of the pencil. Baron Lothar von Faber transformed the family business during the nineteenth century, pursuing superior raw materials and modern production methods while building an international distribution network. In 1856, he secured mineral rights to a graphite mine in Siberia; he also travelled extensively through Europe while developing a dealer network, with commercial operations established in New York, London, Paris, Vienna and St Petersburg.
Lothar’s significance was not simply technological. He understood something that would later become fundamental to luxury: the object itself could carry a name, a standard and an idea of origin.
Faber was among the first pencil manufacturers to develop a recognisable branded product rather than allowing the pencil to remain an anonymous commodity. The company turned an everyday writing instrument into an object whose quality could be identified before it was even used.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, that philosophy had evolved into something more specialised.
In 1908, Count Alexander von Faber-Castell introduced the Polychromos coloured pencil. Its name would become associated with professional colour work, and the original challenge was surprisingly sophisticated: achieving coloured leads with sufficient lightfastness to make them appropriate for serious artistic use. The first Polychromos range appeared in 60 colours, establishing a product that Faber-Castell still describes as a classic more than a century later.
The contemporary Polychromos is a very different technological achievement from the 1908 pencil, but the principle has remained remarkably consistent. The current pencils use high-quality, acid-free pigments; offer high lightfastness; have a soft colour laydown; and are water-resistant and smudge-proof. Their 3.8-millimetre leads are designed for break resistance through Faber-Castell’s secural bonding process. The range now extends to 120 colours.
This is where the collaboration becomes more interesting than a conventional luxury co-branding exercise.
RIMOWA and Faber-Castell are not simply placing two logos on the same object. They represent two different answers to the same question: how do we preserve something while allowing it to move?
The RIMOWA case protects the instrument. The pencil records experience.
One is architectural; the other is intimate.
One is built around impact, compression, distance and time. The other is built around pressure, colour, observation and the movement of a human hand.
Together they create something resembling the historical idea of the atelier portatif—the portable workshop. Artists have always travelled with their means of production. Renaissance painters carried materials between commissions; architects travelled with drawing instruments; naturalists documented landscapes in notebooks; designers developed ideas away from the studio. The sketchbook became a technology of memory long before photography made the instantaneous image ubiquitous.
There is a peculiar intimacy to drawing that photography cannot completely replace. To draw something is to spend time looking at it. A camera can register a face in a fraction of a second; the pencil asks the eye to negotiate its contours. It records not only what was seen but how long someone looked.
That makes the pencil an instrument of attention.
And attention has become a luxury.
In an age in which images can be generated, altered, duplicated and distributed almost instantaneously, the physical act of making acquires a different cultural weight. The hand becomes evidence. The pressure of the graphite or pigment, the irregularity of a line, the accumulation of colour: these are traces of human presence that cannot be separated entirely from the process that produced them.
The Artist Case consequently arrives at an interesting moment. It belongs to the luxury market, but it also belongs to a much older culture of making. Its aluminium shell is recognisably RIMOWA; its contents descend from a pencil introduced in 1908. The result is a meeting between industrial modernism and analogue concentration.
Even the German provenance is significant. Both companies have built their identities around manufacturing traditions rooted in Germany, although their histories are separated by more than a century. RIMOWA continues to describe German engineering as central to its design philosophy and maintains production in Germany; Faber-Castell continues to manufacture at its historic site in Stein, where the company’s long relationship with pencil production began.
This continuity is increasingly rare.
Luxury today often depends upon novelty: the new collaboration, the new drop, the new colour, the new object to be photographed and replaced. Heritage, by contrast, is valuable precisely because it resists the logic of immediate replacement. A historic object accumulates meaning through use. Scratches become records. Patina becomes biography. A pencil becomes shorter because someone used it.
RIMOWA has long understood this relationship between travel and ageing. Its aluminium cases are designed to endure the marks of movement rather than conceal them. Faber-Castell’s Polychromos, meanwhile, is designed to leave marks of its own—marks intended, paradoxically, to remain.
The Artist Case brings these two forms of endurance together.
It is a case for pencils, but it is also a case for the idea that creativity should remain mobile. The artist does not need to wait for the perfect studio, the perfect desk or the perfect conditions. A landscape can become a drawing. A hotel room can become an atelier. An airport lounge can become the beginning of a composition. A journey can become a work before it becomes a memory.
Perhaps that is why the collaboration feels so naturally RIMOWA.
The suitcase has always represented departure. The pencil represents the impulse to remember.
Between the two sits the artist: travelling, observing, recording.
The luxury is not simply in owning an exceptionally crafted case. It is in carrying the possibility of creation with you.
Some journeys begin on paper.
The better ones leave something behind.
Courtesy of Rimowa and Faber-castell.