You many be surprised, but ball pens or even pencils are not really low-tech products. Their production needs precision equipment and cutting-edge supply chain. You can´t make a pencil in your basement.
side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that fled the 1917 revolution, worked in Paris and settled in Switzerland inbetween the world wars.
side note: "caran d'ache" actually means pencil in Russian which in turn borrowed the name from Turkic, where cara(n) means black and ache is stone. The company is Swiss, but it was set up by a Russian cartoonist that fled the 1917 revolution, worked in Paris and settled in Switzerland inbetween the world wars.