The company is headquartered in Forks Township, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley region of the state.

[3] Originally an industrial pigment supply company, Crayola soon shifted its focus to art products for home and school use, beginning with chalk, then crayons, followed later by colored pencils, markers, paints, modeling clay, and other related goods.

[4] Crayola also produces Silly Putty and a line of professional art products under the 'Portfolio Series brand', including acrylics, watercolor, tempera, and brushes.

Binney's experimentation with industrial materials, including slate waste, cement, and talc, led to the invention of the first dustless white chalk, for which the company won a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

"[9][11] The suffix "-ola" was also popular in commercial use at the time, lending itself to products such as granola (1886),[12] pianola (1901),[13] Victrola (1905),[14] Shinola (1907),[15] and Mazola (1911).

The Rubens Crayola line, started in 1903,[18] was directly targeted at artists and designed to compete with the Raphael brand of crayons from Europe.

[19] In April 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair, Binney & Smith won the Golden Medal for their An-Du-Septic dustless chalk.

[20][21] Subsequently, Crayola used the opportunity to develop a new packaging strategy by emphasizing their gold medal on the front of many of their products and crayon boxes.

This strategy turned out to be so successful and recognizable to their brand that they phased out nearly all of their other Crayola line box designs to adapt to the gold medal format, which appeared on their packaging for the next 50-plus years.

[22][23] They retained the Munsell name on products such as “Munsell-Crayola” and “Munsell-Perma” until 1934, and then incorporated their colors into their own Crayola Gold Medal line of boxes.

Further expansion took place in 1958 with the introduction of the 64-color pack that included the company's first crayon sharpener built into the box.

[7] In 1977, Binney & Smith acquired the rights to Silly Putty, a stretchy, bouncy silicon rubber compound.

Crayola Crayons were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 1998.

On January 1, 2007, Binney & Smith reorganized as Crayola LLC, to reflect the company's number one brand.

The box of these crayons included a gradient skin tone label, and for the first time color names were written in French, English, and Spanish.

[39][40] The Smithsonian National Museum of American History maintains a collection of Crayola crayons founded by an original 64-color box donated by Binney & Smith in 1998.

[26] The Crayola crayon was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame as a founding member at its inception.

[42] In 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a 32-cent postage stamp to commemorate the cultural impact the product has had on almost all Americans.

[56] Binney & Smith acquired the Liquitex corporation, a producer of fine art supply products, in 1964, but sold it to the Colart company in 2000.

Marketed as a general (non-coloring)-use crayon for industrial purposes, Staonal was developed in 1902 and still continues as of 2018[update].

[58] Numerous products, ranging from bath and personal care items to bedding and electronics, are produced by other companies using the Crayola brand name under license.

[62] In the 1996–1997 season, Crayola produced Christmas lights using its name with colors such as pink, orange, blue, gold, green, red, and more.