"Shepenco is proud to announce our Connected+ Partnership with commonsku. We're looking forward to building new relationships and strengthening existing ones through this partnership with commonsku, and to continuing to deliver the quality, speed, and customer service Shepenco is known for."
— Daniel Townes, COO, Shepenco
We're excited to welcome Shepenco to commonsku as our newest Connected+ Supplier. With their PromoStandards integration now live, distributors can submit electronic purchase orders (ePOs) for one of the most enduring product lines in promo, all from inside their commonsku workflow.
Shelbyville Pencil Company, known across the industry as Shepenco, is one of the few remaining U.S. pencil manufacturers, and one of the most beloved family businesses in promo. D.L. Townes founded the company in 1933 with a simple guiding principle: produce an ordinary item of extraordinary quality.
The company is based in Shelbyville, Tennessee — nicknamed "Pencil City" by the governor in the 1950s for its concentration of pencil makers. Shepenco prints and decorates pencils in-house, with team members who've been on the floor for decades and has offered a line of FSC®-certified manufacturing since 2008. They sell exclusively through promotional product distributors, and PPAI ranks them among its top 100 suppliers in the industry.
Four generations later, the Townes family is still running it. Dan Townes owns the business today and runs it with three of his sons. Daniel (COO), Travis (Distributor Relations), and Ben Townes (Director of Systems and Operations) represent the fourth generation actively shaping where Shepenco goes next.
For Ben, the through-line across nearly a century of business is clear:
"In almost a century, we've put hundreds of millions of impressions into customers' hands, and every one of them had to land the same way. High quality, on time, every time."
— Ben Townes, Director of Systems and Operations, Shepenco
That standard is what's kept Shepenco relevant across generations of distributors and decades of industry change. It's also what makes the company a natural fit for
Connected+: a partnership built on the same expectation of consistency and reliability that distributors count on every day.
Explore the Shepenco Collection on commonsku — Shepenco's hand-picked pencil lineup for distributors.
The Collection brings Shepenco's most-requested pencils into one easy-to-browse hub on commonsku, with the imprinting and decoration options they're known for. From classic wood pencils to carpenter pencils, it's a curated lineup distributors can pull from directly into a Presentation or Shop.
Customer Action
Already a commonsku customer? Log in, open the Shepenco Collection, and add products directly to a Presentation or Shop in a few clicks.
Through Shepenco's PromoStandards integration, distributors get:
Everything happens inside commonsku — a faster path from quote to confirmed order, less manual data entry, and clearer visibility on every Shepenco line item in your merch projects.
Customer Action
For commonsku customers: Submit your commonsku credentials to Shepenco to get PromoStandards integrated.
Exploring commonsku? Now's a good moment to see how our Connected+ supplier community fits into a connected workflow built for promo distributors.
At commonsku, we're building more than software. We're strengthening the skummunity with tools and partnerships that help your business grow.