Grey Ray Stationery | Interview | CITY MAGAZINE May 2014

Interview by City Magazine

writer : Rungvisa

“ You cannot do, or you just never do it before?”

– Chanchalad Khanjanawong

Unruly minded man with GREY RAY stationery

Education: Decorative Arts, Department of Interior Design, Silpakorn University Career : Founder / Design Director of Grey Ray stationery and Owner of Art House

Unruly people sounds not really good, but not for this man. He defined the “unruly people” in his opinion that unruly people is not a bad people, but they have their own way to figure things out. Unruly people is a curious kind of people; they will figure things out until they find the right answer. Some may say they’re stubborn. But people like them called themselves as ‘serious nonsense’ kind of people.

It’s true… we have met him before when he just started the stationery project. Why he, who is an owner and a teacher for 15 years, interested in creating ‘pencil cap’ which never have been needed and no one ever asked for it. But then he turned this ‘pencil cap’ to be needed with the simple and cool design, guaranteed by the Design Excellence Award (DE-Mark) from DITP and Good Design Award (G-mark) from Japan. Those awards can prove well about his unruly mind: ‘grey people’ refers to the people who is not so white, yet not so black. Unruly mind and the stationery don’t sounds so match but actually it is. And it does change the world too, in a good way.

Question : How GREY RAY start?

Chanchalad : I own an art school called “Art House” for 15 years and I wanted to increase the business. I was happened to read an article of Mr.Choke Boonkul about the Chokechai Farm. His article mentioned that the business can be increase from the inside, not only outside. His words made me rethink about the school. The stationery is one good way to increase the business of art school so I started to design the product for my school. I didn’t set the goal just to sell the product for my own school, but for everyone. If the product is good, I want everyone to use it. That’s the beginning of GREY RAY

Question : Tell me about the pencil cap

Chanchalad : Pencil cap called ‘EE Defender’ was the first product of GREY RAY. The idea came up from the insight that I studied the behavior of the student in art school which everyone use the EE drawing pencil (some may called 8B pencil) which is fragile and easily broken because it needed to be sharpened in a very long rocket shape. I observed what children used to protect the pencil lead, and found out that some use tissue paper, some used sponge, but no one ever made the protecter for this EE pencil. I researched from 200 students to figure out the median of the popular length of pencil lead that children sharpen. The median length was 3.8 cm, which is the best length for the drawing for Thai student. The reason why they sharpen the pencil to be this long is because it is a culture in thai art school. I made this pencil cap just for them.