Efforts to turn pencilmaking into a guild-approved craft failed due to lack of approval from the Nuremberg Rugsamt, which supervised trades in the city and its environs.
Thus in 1771 Faber undertook the first attempts to improve pencils by combining ground graphite with sulfur, antimony, and binding resins.
The technique of gluing pencils into wooden sticks[clarification needed] was already well known in Nuremberg at that time, but Faber did not use it.
During Faber's lifetime, his pencil production business was still on a small scale.
With his small workshop he laid the foundation for a pencil factory which his great-grandson Johann Lothar Freiherr von Faber expanded into the world-famous Faber-Castell brand in the middle of the 19th century.