Wonderful World of Wopex – The Neon Line

Welcome to a new series of blog posts about Staedtler’s Wopex pencils.

The idea is to collect information about Wopex pencils while details are still available. By now several bloggers, including me, had to find out that stationery manufacturers don’t always store information about their products and in my opinion it would be a shame to lose the existing knowledge about these products.

Wopex -> 180

A quick introduction:
As explained in the past Staedtler has changed the way it’s using the term Wopex. Instead of calling the pencils Wopex the term is now only used to describe the material these pencils are made from. This started in 2015 and by now you won’t find any Wopex labelled pencils anymore on the German Staedtler web site. Instead these pencils are sold as the Noris eco or as the Staedtler 180 ^[1]From the beginning ‘180’ were the first digits of the Wopex article numbers.. In other markets, mainly South Africa, you can also get the Tradition eco, a Wopex based version of the Tradition, similar to the Noris eco.

Outside Germany you can however still find pencils with the Wopex label printed on them. In the UK there are quite a few of those sets left. I assume this means that for now they are still made – I can’t imagine all of them to be old stock from before 2015 – but who knows…

Neon Line

Staedtler’s Neon Line was introduced at Frankfurt’s Paperworld in January 2013. Neon refers to the fluoresent body of these pencils. The pencils themselves contain normal Wopex graphite leads.

Back then the pencils were still Wopex labelled, but the latest Neon Line pencils are sold without Wopex or even 180 printed on the front of the cover.

The different pencils

The Neon Line includes the following pencils

• neon yellow – article number: 180 HB-F1
• neon orange – article number: 180 HB-F4
• neon pink – article number: 180 HB-F20
• neon purple – article number: 180 HB-F61
• neon green – article number: 180 HB-F50
• neon blue – article number: 180 HB-F30

The different sets

There are different versions of this set, including sets with erasers and sharpeners. The current Staedtler UK web site lists different sets:

• Article number: 180F BK3-1 a blistercard containing one HB pencil each in neon yellow, neon pink, neon purple
• Article number: 180FSBK3-1 as above, but with a black eraser and a black sharpener
• Article number: 180F BK3-2 a blistercard containing one HB pencil each in neon green, neon orange, neon blue
• Article number: 180FSBK3-2 as above, but with a black eraser and a black sharpener
• Article number: 180F BK6 a blistercard with all six colours
• Article number: 180F BK12 a blistercard with twelve pencils (all six colours)

 

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This information has also been added to the Stationery Wiki.

I would like to thank Benedikt Schindler for the historic information found in this blog post