The Pen Addict 131/transcript

The Pen Addict Podcast Transcript
Episode:	131
Title:	Not The Abbreviated Version
Release Date:	December 2nd, 2014
Hosts:	Brad Dowdy Myke Hurley
Guests:	Brian Goulet
Additional Information
Official page:	Episode 131
Audio File:	Audio Episode 131
Podcast page:	The Pen Addict 131
Length:	8989 min <br />1.483 h <br /> minutes
Previous Transcript	Next Transcript

Myke Hurley: From RelayFM, this is The Pen Addict podcast. This week's episode of The Pen Addict is brought to you by lynda.com, where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts. For a 10-day free trial, visit lynda.com slash penaddict, Hover, where you'll find simplified domain management, and Karis Customs, makers of the Render K, the Bolt, the Ink, and so many more fantastic pens that you're going to hear about a little later on in today's episode. My name is Myke Hurley, and I'm joined, as always, by the pen addict himself, the man with the plan, Mr. Brad Dowdy.

Brad Dowdy: Hey, buddy, how you doing?

Myke Hurley: I'm good, how are you?

Guest Introduction

Brad Dowdy: I'm doing real good, I'm doing real good, and I'm excited about today's guest, Myke. We have a guest? We have a guest today, and he's being quiet right now, but it's definitely not going to be a quiet episode, knowing this guy like I do. I'd like to say hello to Mr. Brian Goulet from Goulet Pens. How's it going, Brian?

Brian Goulet: I am doing fantastic today, Brad. Thank you, guys, both for having me on.

Brad Dowdy: Well, we certainly appreciate you taking the time. This is in this most busy time of year for you.

Brian Goulet: Yeah, it's really kind of the worst timing in the world that I could be doing this, but that just goes to show how dedicated I am to you guys here. I just, honestly, I'm so thrilled. I've been thinking about this for years because I've been aware, you know, you, especially Brad with the pen addict stuff. And it's always been on my mind, like, we definitely need to do something in the future. And as soon as this opportunity came up, I was like, I'll just move my schedule around. Whatever happens, I just want to make this happen. So happy to do it.

Brad Dowdy: Well, we certainly appreciate you moving the schedule around. And speaking of moving the schedule around, Myke, we had to move it. This isn't in the show notes, but I wanted to bring this up, and I wanted to put you on the spot. And I want you to tell the people why we had to move from Monday to Tuesday this week, because I think this is important and you deserve the platform. So please tell us why.

Myke Hurley: So there is a fantastic game in the iOS app store called Monument Valley, which I'll put in the show notes in case you haven't played it. You definitely should play this game. The developers of that game, Us2 Games, they're based in London. And a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed the executive producer of Monument Valley, a guy called Dan, on Inquisitive, on one of our shows on RelayFM. And afterwards, Dan said, Apple have asked us, Us2, to participate in an Apple Store event. Now, these are where they'll get people in. It's from what's called the Meet the Developer series. So they have developers come and they talk to them, so they'll have somebody interview them. And the guys at Us2 asked if I would interview them in the Regent Street Apple Store, which I did yesterday, on World AIDS Day, which is really important, because Monument Valley has a level of their game, which is currently in the Apps for Red campaign. So it's all the proceeds of that level are going to the World AIDS effort. So yesterday, I got to interview one of the guys over at Us2, all about Monument Valley, on the stage of the Apple Store in Regent Street, which is one of the biggest Apple stores in the world. And it's going to be, it isn't yet, which is quite a shame, because I would have liked it for the show notes. But there is a video, there is also an audio, and it will be a podcast, which will be available on the podcast store on iTunes. I was hoping it would have been by now, but it would be today or tomorrow as we record this. So people will be able to watch me on stage. And it went a lot better than I expected, because I've never done anything like this before. I've never done an in-person podcast. I've never had it filmed. And there was also a small audience as well. But yeah, I was really, really pleased about it, actually.

Brad Dowdy: Yeah, so that's a huge step. And I wanted to make sure I dropped that in on you and get you talking about that, because I think it's a big deal. Well, and I'm proud of you, and I wanted to say congratulations, because I really think that's awesome.

Brad Dowdy: All right, so on your way to the Apple store to do your interview, did you go pick up any packages or anything? Or was this maybe from yesterday?

Myke Hurley: Today.

Brad Dowdy: Today.

Package Contents

Myke Hurley: I received an awesome package today that I think you knew about. You at least knew some of it. I don't know if you knew all of it. Yeah. So I have in my hands one of the new standard issue DDC factory floor, like the triple pack. Yeah. That came to me via a third party, a new third party, a new secret third party.

Myke Hurley: And it's our friend, your friend, Sarah, who you met for XOXO, right? Yeah.

Brad Dowdy: That's exactly right. Yep. Sarah lives in Portland, and she made a trip to the Draplin pop-up shop just for us, Michael.

Myke Hurley: Oh, that's just, she's too nice. But there was more in that package, Brad. Do you know about this part?

Brad Dowdy: That I don't know.

Myke Hurley: So I think this may be one of my favorite things I've ever been given. It's RelayFM greetings cards.

Myke Hurley: And I can't remember the name of the process, but what is it called when you cut out?

Brad Dowdy: She cuts papers with lasers.

Myke Hurley: Die cut, is that?

Brad Dowdy: Yeah, it's laser cut. Laser cut. It's literally lasers cutting. She has a company called Candy Spotting, where that's what she does. She does projects, you know, greeting cards and various other huge amounts of projects where she cuts out all the designs with lasers.

Myke Hurley: And I'm just blown away. I have six cards here. I've put a link to a picture of them in the chat room. They're in beautiful Relay Blue, and they just look incredible. And I am absolutely blown away by them. So thank you, Sarah. And Sarah also actually put an Oregon sticker in the package for me, which I've now stuck straight to my laptop. Because I'm missing my Portland stickers from my original MacBook Pro.

Brad Dowdy: From the pre-spill days.

Brad Dowdy: Well, cool. Actually, I did know about the Relay cards, and they're really, really sweet. She showed them with me beforehand, and I was like, oh, he's going to die when he sees those. So that's pretty cool.

Myke Hurley: Yeah, just so blown away. So thank you so much to Sarah for doing that for us. Because I always, not always, I get these things. I get things in the post every now and then. Like, there are just things that arrive for me from listeners of this show. Like, I also had a listener, Mel, send me some cool stuff. And she actually wrote me a letter from inside of Bung Box. Yeah.

Brad Dowdy: Mel is our primary Japanese translator for the show. If you didn't know that. Ah, okay. That's who that is.

Myke Hurley: Right. And Mel sent me a bunch of, like, they're from Muji. And they're, like, bookmarks. You know, like the little threaded bookmarks that you get inside of Moleskines and stuff. Like, a selection of those that you can put into other notebooks. Which is really cool. So you can kind of clip them in. So I get these awesome things from people. But when this arrived and it was like candy spotting, I was like, somebody bought me some sweets or something. Yep.

Brad Dowdy: Yep. That's Sarah's company name.

Myke Hurley: I'm putting those in the show notes. And I, so thank you, Sarah. I haven't thanked her privately yet. But I'm interested in maybe having some relay cards made now. Ooh, nice. Add a bigger stack. Maybe to send out as my own Christmas cards or something. Cool. Because I love these ones and I don't want to use them. I want to keep them forever. Awesome. Did you get any of the factory floor?

Brad Dowdy: I did. I did. I got some from Sarah and I ordered a couple more from the site. So, yeah.

Myke Hurley: Pretty sweet, huh?

Brad Dowdy: I've got the full hookup, yeah. So I'm just waiting to crack one open and get using it. It's going to be sweet.

Myke Hurley: I have a complaint to make.

Brad Dowdy: Okay.

Myke Hurley: My usual complaint.

Myke Hurley: Customs. I just want to complain about customs. So I have something which I've ordered, which I'm so excited about. And I hoped it would be here by now. But it's sitting in customs. It entered customs two days ago now. And that's all it says. So I don't know if I'm going to get one of those letters, which is going to make me pay like another $100. I may get that. But it's the whole thing that I'm sitting here. And I don't know what's going to happen next. I'm just sitting and waiting to find out if and when I'm going to receive this awesome package. And I've kind of teased it, but I figure I'm just going to go for it now. And Brad doesn't know about this, what I bought here, but I think he's going to be interested. I've bought the Topo River Briefcase.

Mountain Briefcase

Brad Dowdy: Oh, nice. The Mountain Briefcase.

Myke Hurley: The Mountain Briefcase. That's it.

Brad Dowdy: Yeah.

Myke Hurley: The Doan paper one.

Brad Dowdy: Oh, wow. Even better. So, yeah. Well, I've gotten since we've mentioned doing a bag episode like twice now. I keep getting emails saying, you need to do this. You need to do this. So we'll do that soon.

Myke Hurley: Yeah. Because I was looking around and this met it. You know Chase Reeves, don't you? Yeah. So Chase did a great video about this bag. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, he did. Well, the previous edition, the green one. I don't think it's the Doan one, but just the regular one. And I saw that and I was looking around and I knew that you loved yours and I read your stuff about it again. And then I just decided that I'm going to go with it. Do you know why I said, I just realized why I said river. Yeah. It's a river paper.

Brad Dowdy: Ah, oh, okay. I'll, yeah, sure. Anyway, that's. Tomoe River Paper. Uh-huh.

Tomoe River Paper

Myke Hurley: It's Tomoe River Papers. I said Topoe River Briefcase.

Brad Dowdy: Oh, okay. I see what you did there.

Myke Hurley: See where my brain went with that? Yeah. So yeah, I'm so excited to get it.

Brad Dowdy: So Brian, as a retailer, how much do you enjoy dealing with shipping?

Brian Goulet: Well, it's kind of a, you know, inevitable thing to have to deal with. You know, I'm sure we see the good, the bad, and the ugly. Yeah. And the thing that I've learned the most is that everybody has good days and bad days.

Brad Dowdy: Yeah. I mean, it's a necessary evil. I mean, it just is what it is. And, you know, Myke, you're just, you're about to get stuck, I'm sure, on this one. I'm interested to see how it plays out. Because, I mean, you have, the thing that frustrates me just listening to you, Myke, is the custom system seems to be random. Like, some things skate through, and then some things you just get nailed on, and you don't know when or where that's going to happen. So.

Myke Hurley: I don't know what part of it frustrates me more, whether it's the cost or the delay. Because currently, like, it entered customs at 11 a.m. on December 1st. Well, actually, no. You know, it says, no, no, 11 a.m. on December 1st. And it says that it's received customs clearance twice now. And there's no information about it at all. This isn't a USPS system. Right. So it's like, well, what then? Like, do I have to wait for this letter? Like, is my package ever going to make it? And what really frustrates me is a lot of the time, and a lot of the cost, is on the cost of customs looking at the package. It's like, I don't want you to do it, so why are you charging me for it? Like, I can't understand it. Like, I didn't ask for it. I've already paid for this to be shipped. Like, I don't know why. I mean, I'm sure there's great reasons why I need to pay customs in the first place. I don't understand why I need to do that. And I really don't understand why I need to pay for the customs official, like, an admin fee for them to look through it. I'm not inconveniencing anyone. You have decided to look at this item. Like, it's not like everything that goes through has to go through customs. It's so frustrating. It's just maddening. Because if people weren't honest on the shipping information, this wouldn't happen. Yeah, the customs forms. So it's like it requests. It's like it is, like, suggesting dishonesty is a good thing to do. And that annoys me so much. It just really, really annoys me. Because if he just said it was a gift, then it would never get picked up.

Brad Dowdy: Yep. We get asked about that. We get asked about that a lot, I was going to say. But as retailers, we're not going to put our butt in a sling for you. No, because you shouldn't.

Myke Hurley: And I would never ask someone to do it. Because it's actually not your problem. But I'm sure that all of your customers think it is. I mean, I'm in the lucky position where I am friends with people who sell stuff. So I understand the position that you're in. But as a consumer, it is extremely frustrating. Very, very frustrating.

Brad Dowdy: Yep. I'm with you. I feel you on that. And I know Brian has to deal with a lot of that. And we dealt with a lot of that, especially during our Kickstarter time. Because we had so many international orders. And it's, you know, it's just a, like I said, it's a necessary evil. And it's a bone of contention for a lot of people. So hopefully you will, this will get through swimmingly. And you will have it later this week so we can talk about it. All right, Mr. Goulet. We are ready for you. We are. All right. We're going to dig into all things Goulet. But before we do that, let us talk about one of our good friends, one of our sponsors. Myke, would you like to talk about Lynda?

Myke Hurley: Lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn something new. With Lynda.com, you get access to a growing library of hundreds of thousands of high-quality, fantastically produced video tutorials that can help you learn something new. Lynda.com can help you turn ideas into hobbies or businesses. Lynda.com can help you perfect something that you've already known for years or learn something you've always wanted to try. Lynda.com works directly with people who are total experts in certain fields. Sometimes they work with the creators of specific hardware products directly to make sure that they have the very best person to help you learn. And they try and get these courses out as quick as they possibly can. Their courses are broken down into bite-sized chunks. This allows you to jump in and learn at your own pace. Lynda makes it easy for you to build a course schedule that's tailored to you. You can create your own playlist of videos so you can plan what you want to watch and when you want to watch it. And this can be from so many different types of things. Maybe you want to learn a little bit about presentations. So how to present better at work or maybe you want to learn how to use Keynote or PowerPoint better. But they can also give you tips on actually how to present. So not just so much from the idea of this is how you create a good-looking Keynote. But this is also some tips on how to present. And I like that sort of stuff. And I like those two different sides that Lynda gives. Like for example, you can learn time management training. Or you can learn about getting things done, which is presented by David Allen, the curator of it. Or you can learn like typing skills. So it's like you take a certain type of thing, a certain type of course. And you can learn from both sides of it. Like the software and the hardware needed, but also the practicality. Like they have some photography stuff. So you can learn how to use Lightroom and Aperture. But you can also learn how to take great portrait photos. I like that. All of Lynda's courses are available to you for just $25 a month. They have apps on iPhone, iPad and Android. I like so I can watch these when I'm out and about. And I can also set up a second screen at home so I can learn whilst watching. And I can basically sit and use the program that I'm learning, for example. If for some crazy reason you haven't already tried out Lynda.com, now's the time as we have a special extended 10-day free trial for listeners of this show. Visit Lynda.com slash PenAddict to sign up. That's Lynda.com slash PenAddict. If you do, that really does help this show. So please just go and try them out if you never have before. I'm sure you'll be very pleased. Thank you so much to Lynda for their support of this show.

Brad Dowdy: Awesome. Thank you, Lynda.com. All right, Brian. Well, welcome again to the show. And thank you for sitting through our lovely follow-up, which we just have to do. We have some good stuff and some good listeners sending us stuff. So we got to talk about them sometimes. But I think what I want to start with with you, and it's probably a story you've told 100 times to 100 different people. But since you haven't been on this show, and this is an audience that probably knows you and Goulet Pens. But for those that don't and those that are listening for the first time and those that have never heard of Goulet Pens, tell us how Goulet Pens came to be. What's the background and how did everything get started in what has become really one of the biggest pen and ink retailers on the web?

Brian Goulet: Yeah, I will do my best to keep this story short because I am not known for my brevity. So long story short, it started about eight years ago just as a hobby. I was, you know, working with my dad. I just graduated college. My wife and I were newly married, and I was just looking for something to do. I was very hands-on. I liked building stuff. I was a big fan of New Yankee Workshop and, you know, woodworking shows and stuff. Always been a fan of tools. So I was really looking to build something, but I was living in an apartment at the time and didn't really have a workshop per se. And so this kind of itching desire I had to create things was something that I was having a hard time fulfilling. So I had a covered balcony that was attached to our apartment. And somehow I convinced my wife that it would be a good idea for me to buy a small lathe and start turning wooden pens out on my balcony. Very random thing. Not something most people do. But it was quiet enough and it was inexpensive enough for me to start doing to satisfy this desire that I had. So I draped extension cords out the windows and ran lights and hung pegboard and you name it. And that really just was the plan. I was just going to make pens. I had no idea how to do it. I had no idea that it would turn into anything at all. It was just kind of on a whim. And as it turns out, I made the first pen and that feeling of having created something. Brad, I'm sure you know this feeling well now being a manufacturer. Just, you know, taking something and turning it into something else that is a new product, that something that people can use. There's like no greater feeling than doing that. It's very, very satisfying. And that's kind of what started it for me. And about two weeks after I started turning pens, the company my wife was working for at the time got wind of these wooden pens. They were giving out pens every year as a gift to their clients. And they thought that the wooden pen thing was really interesting. So they asked me to show them some of these pens I was turning. And being the entrepreneur that I am, I wasn't going to let a two-week-long experience hold me back from showing my magnificent product. So I showed them what were at the time very rough prototypes of these pens and somehow convinced them that, you know, it would be a good idea to have them buy 120 of my pens and engrave them and give them out to their clients. So, you know, it was just very fortunate that that situation happened. And so at that point, I was like, well, I guess this is a business now. It's not a hobby anymore. So, you know, I did all the business-y things that business people do to start a business and started turning pens. I had to kind of learn how to do it on the fly. But at the time of delivery, I was very proud. And, you know, those pens now are probably some of the most valuable possessions that I could think of. And I have yet to see another one of them, actually, from that initial batch. So it's kind of interesting. But I'm realizing this is not the abbreviated version here. But anyway, long. Okay. Wrapping that up. Did that for a couple of years. My passion for woodworking, my passion for pen making never really was enough to sustain me financially, partly because I have a tool-buying addiction that was fed by this ability to write things off in the business. So I would sink all of my profits back into more tools, more pens, more wood. That was something that I was not very careful of early on. But also it was the economy at the time. I'd started doing this in 2007. Everybody was rocking and rolling. 2008, 2009 rolled around. You know, corporate gifts for wooden pens were not really on anybody's radar anymore. So I was kind of looking around thinking, what am I going to do? You know, my wife had gotten pregnant at the time by me, just for clearing that up. I make it sound like it was an accident or something. But, you know, we're moving along in the life cycle here. And I'm kind of searching around trying to find, like, how I'm going to make this business into something that I can do long term. Because I really wanted to be, you know, self-employed. And so I got wind of this fountain pen show in Washington, D.C. And I was like, okay, there's a pen show? Like, okay, that's neat. So I'd heard about it through a friend of mine who was also kind of making these pens as a hobby. And I was like, hey, maybe we can go check it out and maybe get a booth next year. I could, you know, maybe find something. You know, if there's like a group of people that are into pens, maybe that's kind of what I'm missing. Because I was selling to the corporate crowd, but the gift pen thing was really just, it was a gift more than it was a writing instrument. You know what I mean? Sure. And so they weren't really, like, you know, heavy users of pens. And so I was kind of, I heard wind of this thing. This would have been in 2009 now. And I went to the fountain pen show in 2009 in D.C. And I had no idea what I was stepping into. I didn't know anything about fountain pens. The only reason they were even on my radar is because the pens that I was turning out of wood, you know, it was a kit that you would press together into the wood and you could either use a rollerball refill or you could use a fountain pen refill. And I was doing rollerballs because that's all I knew. And I didn't know anything about fountain pens. And I didn't know anybody who used fountain pens either. So I didn't think that it was much of an opportunity. But when I went to the show, it just kind of opened my eyes. You know, there's a couple thousand people probably that roll through the show over the weekend. And several hundred vendors that are there. And it just kind of opened my eyes that there were people out there that are into fountain pens. And it just, that for me was kind of the epiphany that I just, I needed to learn about fountain pens. So I went home, started searching around online, just looking fountain pens, you know, searching, whatever. I didn't know where to go and stumbled on, you know, some, some blogs, some, you know, forums and stuff. Fountain pen network was a really influential forum for me early on. And I just kind of started researching and talking to people, you know, what are, what is it about fountain pens that is so appealing? You know, what, why are you into this stuff? What is it, what kind of products are you using? What does it have to do with anything? And, you know, I started to get some, some brands on my radar, like Rodia, Claire Fontaine for paper, some, you know, pen brands, Lamy, you know, Pilot, things like that. And as I was talking to people, I was seeing that, you know, there were online retailers, sure, doing fountain pens. A lot of them were brick and mortar, kind of converting over to online. There were some other that were kind of online only. But even in 2009, which was not, you know, it wasn't like the dawn of e-commerce back then. But even at that time, I was seeing that there was a huge, just gaping hole, just an opportunity out there for somebody to really, really just do it right in online retailing, in social media with fountain pens. So, I think it was actually kind of to my advantage that I didn't know anything about them because it allowed me to get a lot of hard knocks in terms of education, you know.

Brian Goulet: Because there wasn't, you know, a lot of videos out there about fountain pens. You know, video is a huge, huge part of what I do now. Right. But back then, it was, you know, YouTube had a limit of 10 minutes on a video. And, you know, there were technical barriers and stuff for producing this kind of stuff. You know, YouTube wasn't even like the video place, you know. I was a big Gary Vaynerchuk fan, and he hosted all his videos on Viddler, you know, which who's heard of that anymore, right? And so, I remember at the time, I was setting up my video vlog, as everybody was calling it, you know, video blog. No one calls it that anymore. You know, I was debating about setting up on YouTube versus Viddler, you know. So, it was kind of like the Wild West a little bit. And fountain pens, you know, are awesome. But, you know, most people who are into fountain pens are not like on the bleeding edge of technology. You know. Right. There are certainly some, but, you know, the very nature of fountain pens is, you know, they're kind of like a product of old, right? You know, so you kind of, you know, that's part of the appeal. So, I recognized there was an opportunity to really kind of just take the best of what I knew technically and bring it to kind of that fountain pen world. And as soon as I started looking into fountain pens, I just fell in love, you know, with the products. I fell in love with the people. Just the people that use fountain pens are so undyingly passionate. And that was, like, what I was missing so much from my rollerball making days, right? I mean, not to bash rollerballs, but, like, in the gift, the corporate gift crowd, you know. Right. It's a commodity, you know. Like, nobody really cares who makes the stuff or anything. It's just a gift, you know. Yeah.

Brad Dowdy: How cheap can we get it? Right.

Brian Goulet: Right. Exactly. And that killed me because I had such deep passion for the pens that I was making at the time, but it wasn't matched by the people that were purchasing them, you know. Yeah. And so once I saw the fountain pen community, the people that were, you know, doing 10, 15,000 posts on the fountain pen network, purely just out of love and sharing what they know about these pens, decades of experience and talking about them. I was just, like, wow, this is something special. Like, I've never stumbled upon this. And so I, like, I got the bug. Like, I got it. I started to understand the way people thought. And it's funny because originally my master plan was not to become a commercial online pen retailer. It was to sell my own pens because I wanted to be a master craftsman. That was my original vision. And so I was originally thinking, like, okay, I'll figure out, like, what complements fountain pens, like ink, paper, stuff like that. I'll get some brand name ink and paper to sell on my site next to my Goulet pens. And then all of a sudden everybody will become aware of me as a craftsman and I'll become this great legend, whatever. It didn't quite work out that way, you know. But, like, a good model for kind of where the direction I was thinking I was heading is Brian Gray with Edison Pens. You know, he has kind of a similar story to me. Started out turning pens, you know, Bexley Pens, very similar kind of track as well. And so I was looking and I was, like, I was kind of a tailing behind Brian Gray by a couple of years. And so I was looking at him and I was like, man, he's doing a cool thing. And if I go, like, that route, like the pen making route, I'm going to be competing with him. And he was, like, kind of legendary on Fountain Pen Network, right? And so I was like, man, like, he's a good guy. Like, he's got a solid reputation. I don't know how I'm going to differentiate myself from him. Like, and it's, you know, my strength is not in, like, machining and programming, you know, these, you know, big lathes and stuff like that. So I was like, this is a really an uphill climb for me going that route. So I kind of had to come to the realization that, like, the pens that I was making at the time for a variety of reasons were not ideal for true fountain pen users, you know, because they were heavy. You know, you had to turn them out of wood. You had to insert these brass tubes in there to stabilize the wood. You know, the metal kits that you would buy, you'd press in for all the threads and stuff like that. You can't make wooden threads. They don't hold up, you know, on a pen. So you got to use metal parts and stuff. So the pens were really heavy. They were weighted really funny. You know, they were all slick metal grips, which some people is okay, but a lot of people don't like them. And so for a variety of reasons, it just wasn't going to work. And I saw the writing on the wall. So I basically had to give up that original dream, a passion of being a pen maker, right? Which was really tough because I had given three and a half years of full-time devotion to that and never saw a penny out of it. So that was very formative for me because I knew that passion and talent alone were not enough to be like a proven model of success in business. I knew that there was that other factor, which was, well, supply and demand, right? Mainly demand. So there had to be that community of people that were there. And that's what I saw in the fountain pen community. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, I can work with this. So I started selling ink and paper. You know, I linked up with Execlair, who's a distributor for Jervon, Rodia, Clairefontaine, Browse, Quivatus, Execompta. They got a bunch of brands that come out of Europe, mainly France. And originally, that's all I had. I was selling paper and ink out of my dining room of my house. You know, my wife was seven months pregnant at the time that we started selling fountain pen supplies. I had a whole workshop. You know, my two-car garage was my workshop that I toiled for a year to build up into that workshop. And then here I wasn't selling like a single pen of mine. But yet I'm like crammed into my dining room like shipping ink and paper all day long, you know? And I was like, something's off with this formula here, you know? So I had, you know, to basically learn the products one at a time. You know, so I would post questions on Fountain Pen Network like, you know, what kind of paper do you guys like that you can't find? And they would say, oh, Clairefontaine Triumph. You know, we love that. We can't find it anywhere. I'd be like, all right, what's so good about Triumph? Oh, my gosh, it's so smooth. You have to write with it. So I'd, you know, order a little bit for myself, try it out. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this paper is unbelievable. Like, why, you know, why does anybody know about this paper? So, you know, I would fall in love with it, try it myself, test it all out, and then start selling it, you know? And then I would post on Fountain Pen Network like, hey, yeah, this paper is awesome. Here's my experience with it. And now I have it. Here it is. And it would start selling immediately. And I was like, well, this is easy, you know? You talk to people about what they want. You get it. And then you tell them you have it. That's kind of the formula that I've been working with for five years now.

Myke Hurley: It seems like such a simple, like, why didn't anyone think of that type of idea? Like, many of these types of things are. But it's like it takes somebody who obviously has a different frame of mind, a different way of thinking to actually do it, you know? Yeah. Because it seems so obvious, doesn't it? Like, ask people what they want and then buy it and sell it to them. Like, that's business.

Brian Goulet: Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I always try to – I laugh because, you know, I've got a fairly large team now. And sometimes, just to be funny, I'll oversimplify things just for comedic effect. You know, just like, well, guys, all we have to do is, you know, buy things and sell them for more than we bought them for. You know, like, that's it. That's pretty much the formula for business, right? Yep. So, anyway.

Brad Dowdy: Yeah, but what your company is now built on, I think – and I kind of picked up with you in the ink and paper days. That's when I at least became aware of Goulet. I don't think I was a Goulet customer then because I wasn't even into fountain pens that much myself. Right. But what happened along the way as I've watched Goulet grow over the years is this became not just another faceless company, right? It's like you and Rachel and the people behind the scenes working there just became part of really the whole experience shopping with Goulet. And whether that's all the effort you put into, like, things like ink samples and the nib nook where you can – you know, you're allowing – you've really become, like, an educational hub for fountain pen users, beginner experts, and anywhere in between. So, how does all that tie into your business as a whole, giving all these other resources to people? I mean, that's a huge, huge deal for you and a huge reason, a huge part of your success that you're putting in the time to create and educate and do all these other things other than just sell people pen and ink.

Brian Goulet: Yeah. I mean, it's – what we do is not complicated, but it's hard, you know. It's hard to learn your products inside and out and, you know, communicate with customers as intimately as we do to, you know, to build up a library of, I don't know, 600 videos now at this point. You know, it's just hard. So – but I think a lot of the reason for it is because of the way we started out in the beginning. You know, I mentioned that, you know, my wife was pregnant, so she had our son 10 days after I did my first video blog post. So, you know, I wasn't really looking at, okay, what's convenient timing here? You know, it was – it was like, where is the need and how do I fill it? And, you know, at that time, you know, actually I wasn't even planning on doing the business full time. I was planning on being a full-time dad and then kind of running the business on the side. Because the thing that you probably would never know seeing my company and what it is now is five years ago, you know, we were completely unknown. It was, you know, untested, unproven that this would be a viable business. I had just kind of tailed off of my failed, you know, fountain pen or pen making hobby, whatever business. So, you know, it was still just so speculative at that point. And so what happened was my wife was on maternity leave at the time. She was pulling the financial wagon for a couple of years for me. And when she had our son, she was planning on going back. And when her maternity leave was ending, she said, I just can't go back. And I was like, really?

Brian Goulet: That wasn't what we talked about. But, you know, she just – she couldn't do it. And I just knew, like, okay, we have to find a way to make this work. You know, we had been prudent. We, you know, we weren't in debt. We, you know, were financially okay. And we had saved up a little bit of money. So we said, okay, you know, what would it take for us to really just make a go at this? You know, it was unproven. It was not a given that it would be successful. But I was like, you know, we could last for eight months or so, you know, really going at it without turning a profit. And if we can't make it happen then, we'll have to find another plan. But, you know, the blog had just started. And I'd done, like, maybe a half dozen videos or something. But I just – I believed so strongly that this was the way that we were going to make it work. That I was willing to take that risk. And, you know, in retrospect, obviously it was a good move. But I tell you, I've never worked so hard in my life as I did in those first six months after our son was born. Because, as anyone with a newborn knows, you don't get a lot of sleep. You don't really know what you're doing. You're constantly doubting yourself. You're having to figure things out day by day. And then you throw a new business on top of that where both you and your wife have no income. And you have a mortgage and a baby. You know, it kind of puts the pressure on a little bit.

Myke Hurley: Brian, the funny thing is, like, you know when you're saying about the baby, you could say the exact same thing for a business. You never sleep. You have no idea what you're doing. Like, it's exactly the same. Maybe you just had, you know, the perfect kind of time.

Brian Goulet: That's how I viewed it too. You know, my wife and I, we met when we were 17. We knew two weeks in that we wanted to get married. And we've lived a very accelerated life. We are very focused and we know what we want and we go after it. So, you know, we don't have a very fruitful social life. I don't watch sports. I don't do any of that other kind of stuff. I'm very focused on my family and my business because that's what I, you know, that's what I choose to do. Everybody else has different interests and that's fantastic. But Rachel and I, we just knew that this is what, this was our destiny, you know. And so for the last five years, it's been our kids and our business. And a lot of times that line gets blurred a lot because, you know, when you have a business, especially in the house with a newborn, I mean, literally, like we wake up at 4 o'clock and our son would be crying and we'd be feeding him. And I'd be drafting a blog post at 4 o'clock in the morning because I'd already be awake and I'd have to wait 45 minutes to change his diaper again and be like, okay, well, you know, let me talk about paper. Why not? You know? So that's just what it took. And so I blogged every single day for like seven months straight in that first, you know, eight-month stretch or whatever just to kind of get a following and just to really kind of get my, get the junk work done in my system because I blogged about all kinds of random stuff. You know, you don't know. You don't really know what your voice is at that point and you don't really have a proven, you know, method or a loyal audience. So you're just trying all kinds of random things. So that's what I did. And then I kind of realized that like videos were really my thing. You know, I really like doing the video stuff, you know. And so once I kind of honed in on that, I just kind of focused on that, you know, for the most part. And, you know, my wife and I were doing a live broadcast too, you know, through Ustream. And we did. I remember this. It was called Right Time. Yeah, that's a throwback right there. We haven't done it in a couple of years because it's just too much. But, you know, we did like 100 of those things, you know, every week. So we'd work a full day. And then at 9 o'clock at night, we would do a live broadcast. No pressure. You know, we would have a chat streaming at the same time. I know you got a chat going on right now for this podcast. But we'd have a chat that we would watch live as we're recording and be talking to people in the chat. And, you know, it was just really fun and cool. And it was just, you know, like you mentioned earlier, it's like, you know, being personal. You know, that's been something we've always wanted to do from the very beginning is, you know. And one of the things I recognized with e-commerce especially is like with the Internet and YouTube and blogs and everything, like Twitter and all that. Like you have more potential now to show people who you are and what you're all about than any point ever in history, you know, for the average person. And to see like e-commerce and, you know, online websites that don't even have like a person's name on the About Us page. I look at that and I'm like, why would you put up a wall like that when you can – it's so much more important to show the personal side of business. And that is something that I think in the last five years has really started to change a lot. But back then even, not a lot of people were doing that. And I would like to say I came up with the idea, but I didn't. I like to think I don't really come up with any original ideas. You know, I'm an observer. I watch a lot of what other people do. I read a ton of books, you know, business leadership books and stuff like that. So I'm okay with not being the first to come up with an idea, but I always look for kind of the alternate path. You know, I look for what I see that no one else is doing and that's the path that I look to go down. And that's what I've done kind of in the fountain pen world. You know, I wasn't the first fountain pen retailer. I wasn't the first online retailer. I wasn't even the first person doing videos. But, you know, I looked at this kind of path that I could weave out for myself and said, yeah, this is the route I'm going to go because no one else is doing it. You know, but my inspiration was, I mentioned earlier, Gary Vaynerchuk. He's big in the wine world. He's a huge social media guy now. And he wrote a book called Crush It in 2009, which changed my life. And he basically did the same kind of thing that I do, but in the wine world. So he had his dad's, you know, wine liquor store and started posting videos, just daily videos for like five years and grew his dad's store like 2,000 fold. You know, it was unbelievable. Maybe even more than that. But it was cool. And so I just saw that and read what he did. And I was like, dang, like, why isn't anybody else doing this? You know, and I saw in the fountain pen world, I was like, I could literally just like copy paste what he did, you know, in the fountain pen world. And again, it's not complicated, but it's not easy. You know, I got to learn fountain pens. I didn't know anything. I didn't know how to do video. I have no video background. You know, I don't know photography, but I had to teach myself photography. I don't know how to manage employees or hire people or run a business or do any of that stuff. But I've had to learn it on the go, you know. And that's what I'm doing now. Learning it all.

Karis Customs

Brad Dowdy: It's certainly awesome. And I want to talk about one of these video series that you put out that I think has been a huge influence for me, huge influence to a lot of people. And that's the Fountain Pen 101 series. And I know you put a lot into that. Before we get into that, I want to talk about another one of our very, very good friends, Michael, Mr. Dan Bishop at Karis Customs.

Myke Hurley: We love Karis Customs. And they're back to sponsor another episode of The Pen Addict. They are a pen maker based in Mesa, Arizona. All of their stuff is made proudly in the United States of America in their very own shop. These guys make a whole range of awesome pens like the Render K, the Ink, the Bolt and the Retract. The last two, the latter two, the Bolt and the Retract. You can now get in gorgeous two-tone colors which look fantastic. Like, they are incredible. Like, aluminium and one of the beautiful colors, like the red, the blue, the orange, the purple. You should be checking those out because they're absolute faves. You can choose the materials that you want these pens to be made out of. All of the pens at Karis Customs. They do aluminium, brass and copper, allowing you to customize your pen with the right balance, weight and texture for you. And you can also choose one of these vivid colors, the awesome colors that they have, to let your pens give a bit of flair too. All of Karis Customs stuff is made of such great care and the materials that they use only get better with time. I'm a huge fan. They make amazing products. I buy everything they do because I know it's made with love and care by pen addicts just like us. The folks over at Karis Customs have a real connection with their customers and this is something they're proud of. They make these pens by hand. They ship them out to all of you guys and they interact with you directly. Definitely. Dan Bishop is usually in the chat room. If he's not already today, I haven't looked. And he's there. He is not. Oh, what's happening? I'm missing. I'm missing. He must be busy for Christmas. That must be it. But Dan is usually in the chat room. It might be because we're recording a different day today. But Dan is in the chat room and he's talking to pen addicts and he's having fun with you guys because that's what these guys are about. They're a great part of this community. So you should show your love for them by buying some of their awesome stuff. And just in time for the holiday season, we can get you 15% off anything in the Karis Customs store if you enter the code pen addict before you check out. It's all one word, pen addict. P-E-N-A-D-D-I-C-T. I don't know why I spelled that. You should know by now, obviously. This code is valid until January the 1st. So get in now and buy some stuff for the pen addict in your life or buy yourself some holiday presents. Thank you so much to Karis Customs for supporting this week's episode of the pen addict and helping us out at RelayFM.

Brad Dowdy: Did you check out the two-tone retract? Yes. Yeah, those look pretty slick. That's the one I don't have yet. So I'm going to have to pick up one of those guys.

Brian Goulet: Yeah, let me just tag team on that. I know Dan a little bit. Super nice guy. And what's really cool is when they did their Kickstarter, he actually emailed me about linking to my store for people. Because he does pens, but he doesn't do ink or anything else like that. But he was aware of my videos and all that. Loved our store. And he asked me if it was cool if he linked to us in the Kickstarter just so that he could help out his loyal pen people and give them a place to have ink and all that. And I was just like, you know, that's really cool for him to use his own platform to plug somebody else, of which he has no affiliation whatsoever. So super nice guy. But that's just very representative of, like, the people in the pen industry. Like, everybody's willing to help each other out. It's so cool.

Brad Dowdy: Exactly. And I love just being part of this community. And I know me and Myke, you know, hear that from, you know, our listeners and readers of the blog and things like that. It's an amazing, amazing community. And I've really never been involved in anything like it. And, I mean, and part of it, you know, to be honest, Brian, is guys like yourself that are just, like, pouring everything into it. Like, I can't imagine the hours, not just on the business side, not just, okay, you know, let's, you know, figure out what products we're going to get in. And figure out how we're going to store them and how we're going to set up the warehouse and how we're going to pack and how we're going to ship and how we're going to pay the bills. And then all of a sudden you have a 19 video series of Fountain Pen 101.

Brian Goulet: Yeah.

Brad Dowdy: Which, that's no small feat. And that's just, I mean, that's like a fraction of the videos that you've done. But this series specifically, how important has it been to your site? Because I know I send a lot of people here that are just learning about fountain pens. And every day, you know, I'm getting emails like, I want to buy my first fountain pen. And I'm worried about, you know, how to fill it or something like that. And, you know, you can only tell them so much in an email or a chat. But then, you know, going out and putting out this whole video series, just tell me about this whole Fountain Pen 101 series.

Brian Goulet: Well, it's interesting because that's what you're describing is very much kind of the motivation that there was behind me doing this series. You know, right now I have a whole team of people that help, you know, customers like day to day. I do what I can, but I'm only one guy. You know what I mean? And so, but you get people that are asking the same question over and over again, you know. And it's like you said, it's really impossible to tell somebody how to do an eyedropper conversion in an email, you know. But if you do a video in like one or two minutes, it conveys a thousand times the information. And it's like, oh, I get it. Okay, cool. So, not only that, not only is the information transferred better, but then, again, it's that more personal feel. You know, especially me, like I care a lot and my passion can come across so much better in a video or in an audio podcast or something like that than it can in an email. You know, there's so much lost in translation in an email. So, in those early days, you know, I didn't have a team of people. It was me and my wife, you know. So, I would have to pack all the orders, unpack everything, you know, do all the blogging, do all the research, answer phones, answer email, you know, all that. I did do everything. So, everything was about like, okay, how do I make my life easier? You know, how do I help people better than I am now? How do I make just everything more efficient, more effective? And a lot of that was video. So, a lot of my earliest videos were basically like, what are people asking me over and over again that I could just do a video on that would help everybody? And then I could just boop, boop, boop, link them to the video, be like, here, check this out. And that spurred so much of the direction that my videos went. And I'd considered doing something like Fountain Pen 101 from the very beginning because, for me, you know, I had to hunt and peck around on different blogs and forums and all kinds of stuff to try to learn. Just, you know, I didn't know anything about fountain pens. I had to figure it all out. And I was sitting here thinking, like, everybody who wants to get into fountain pens that wasn't, like, raised with them in school, they're having to do the same thing I am. Just go around and try and figure it out for themselves. And, you know, most people just aren't going to do that, you know. I mean, for a very dedicated, you know, group of us, we're willing to, you know, the passion carries through that much. But, like, let's try to make it a little bit easier for folks, you know what I mean? So once I'd been into fountain pens for a couple of years, I had been getting asked enough times all of the kind of basic questions. And I thought, like, okay, I feel like I'm finally at a point now where I, I'm not going to say I have the authority, but where I, like, I feel like I can competently put a video together. That can help some people out. You know, that can be, like, a good place for people to just come. Like, if you know nothing else, go to fountain pen 101. You can get your bearings. And then you will be, like, two years ahead of where I was when I first started out. And so that's kind of what was the motivation for fountain pen 101. And it's funny because I look back on it now. It's two and a half years old when I started doing it. And I look, I'm, like, 60 pounds heavier when I do the videos. Like, the production quality is not fantastic.

Brad Dowdy: And you got some rad sweatshirt action going on too.

Brian Goulet: I know, right? Oh, gosh. Like, yeah. So, you know, but, hey, look, if you look back at my earliest videos, I got dirty laundry piled up in the back of my bedroom. Like, you know, I'm not shaving sometimes. Sometimes with my glasses on because it's, like, 2 o'clock in the morning and I had my contact lenses out. Like, I did not worry about the production quality necessarily. I knew that there was, like, it had to be up to a certain quality. But beyond that was just, like, you know, a nice to have. I knew that the content had to be solid. And that was what was most important. And, you know, even today, like, now I have a videographer. I have a photographer. I have people who are better at that stuff than I am that help me to make it look better than I ever could. But even still, for me, the most important thing has always been and still is, do I know my stuff? And am I presenting this in the best way that I feel that I can? And so, you know, something like Fountain Pen 101, that was the best that I knew. And honestly, all that stuff, I still stand behind everything I put together in that. Like, even though it's 2 1⁄2 years old, which is, like, an eternity on the Internet, you know, I still am very proud of that particular video series. Because it is, like, you know, the starting point for anybody who has any interest in fountain pens whatsoever. Just go watch that. And you're going to save yourself 2 years of hunting on the Internet to try to scrap that information together. And then if you really like pens, then you go buy some stuff. Then you go, you know, watch more videos, do that kind of stuff. But, you know, this, it's an hour and a half or so total time for that whole series that will, if you don't, if you don't, if you aren't, like, on fire, crazy about pens at the end of that video, just forget it. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's how I feel about them.

Brad Dowdy: Yeah. So I put in two specific links that, I mean, we'll link to them all on the show notes, obviously, which are at relay.fm slash penaddict slash 131. How did I do, Myke?

Pen Cleaning

Myke Hurley: Perfect.

Brad Dowdy: Yes. Oh, I can never remember that. The pen cleaning and maintenance is a video I link to constantly. You know, that's probably the biggest question I get from people just starting with fountain pens. And then the random one is flying with fountain pens. That question comes up so much. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's all the time, you know, flying with fountain pens. Because, you know, once you get into fountain pens, you want to carry them all the time. And they're not airplane friendly. Utensils. But, you know, when someone's going on a trip, you know, like I feel naked if I don't have one of my fountain pens with me when I've traveled across the country. And I was like, so, yeah, between the most basic of cleaning and maintenance to the outlier items such as flying with fountain pens, I think the whole series has been fantastic.

Brian Goulet: That's great. I'm glad to hear that.

Brad Dowdy: Yep. So, do you have a view count on these? Do you have one of these that it's like super people watch more than other besides probably the first one? Yeah.

Brian Goulet: Yeah. I mean, I've got all my view counts public on YouTube. So, like, it's not a secret or anything. No, no, no. Yeah. I think the, let's see, geez.

Myke Hurley: The most popular video is the Midori Traveler's Notebook with 72,583 views.

Brad Dowdy: Wow. Out of all the videos. Yep.

Myke Hurley: And then it goes Namiki Falcon first impression and then pen maintenance and then how fountain pen works. And it starts to get into a bit more. It gets a bit more varied from there.

Brian Goulet: That Falcon first impression. That's my second most popular video.

Myke Hurley: Yeah, 72,218.

Brian Goulet: Oh, gosh. Wow. That was like the third pen I'd ever used. That's really crazy. Okay. That's an old video. That's an old video. Yeah.

Brad Dowdy: And that Midori video, we could stop right now and do a whole other hour just on that stinking notebook. It's so popular and so customizable. We could do a whole hour show. We'll have to think about that one time since that's turned out to be such a popular video.

Brian Goulet: Definitely. I'd love to talk about that.

Brad Dowdy: I want to talk about one little odd specific thing that I find awesome about Goulet pens. And this is kind of, you know, I'm really dropping in a random, random bit here. You take your packaging very seriously.

Brian Goulet: Mm-hmm.

Brad Dowdy: When you pack an order. It's like you could have your, you know, an own fan blog of just, you know, Gouletpackaging.com. Because people, like, people post images of, like, how y'all packed the orders, how well it's packed, how intensely it is packed sometimes.

Brian Goulet: Mm-hmm. It wasn't like I started this business and I was like, I'm going to be known for the way I pack. You know? It was like, honestly, for me, I'm a very hands-on guy. You know, I was building things. I was making pens. So for me, like, you know, packing stuff up, like, that was, you know, second nature to me almost. And in the early days, I didn't know how to ship anything. I was like, well, I'll use USPS because I don't know how to do anything else. You know, I can ship it out of my house. And so I was like, you know, what kind of boxes do they have? And I'd, like, seen commercials for the flat rate shipping. And so I was like, well, gosh, let me see if I do flat rate versus weight based. You know, I'm charging the same thing for shipping. But, you know, I pay less if it's flat rate if it weighs a certain amount. And it's like, well, okay, that's interesting, you know, and having to figure all that stuff out. And then, you know, they have, like, certain box sizes and stuff like that that you had to kind of work with. And so for me, it was just like, okay, let me see if I can pack it safely in the smallest package, least most economical as possible. Then I can charge less for shipping and be more competitive and so on and so forth. But, you know, the thing that I always say is, like, you know, we're selling fountain pens, which are, you know, small but relatively expensive items. We're selling paper that can get wet or bent or, you know, scratched or whatever. And we're selling ink, which can break or freeze or whatever, you know. It's like it's kind of like the worst combination of things that you're going to be shipping in one package. So I had to think, like, what's the best way to package all this stuff together, you know. And I hate packing peanuts. Like, I hate them with a passion. Like, I hate getting them. I hate dealing with them. They're terrible for the environment. And, yeah, you can buy eco peanuts and all that. But, like, no, I just – you get crud everywhere when you're dealing with packing peanuts. Like, I'm just not going to do it. So I was like, okay. Not to mention the stuff rattles around. It doesn't even work that great anyway. But so I was like, okay, what do we do? I was like, okay, bubble wrap. I'll do bubble wrap and then that's really safe and I can wrap things up and all that. But then stuff would be, like, shifting around inside the bubble wrap because, you know, you got a pen case that's, like, rectangular. And then an ink bottle is all square. And, you know, who knows? The paper is this long, huge pad and it's, like, the weirdest combination. So it's like Tetris every single order you pack up, you know. So I eventually kind of came on the conclusion that, like, I needed to, like, have everything together in, like, one solid brick, you know. So it's like, what do I do to get a brick? And so this whole idea of, like, the stretch wrap, you know, because you like saran wrap, like, cookies on a plate and stuff like that. And, you know, it kind of keeps things together. So I was like, okay, well, what kind of, like, saran wrap type stuff do they have? And I originally, for, like, the first month was using clear saran wrap. But, you know, that was before the whole blue thing really kind of was as intentional as it was. But it was relatively early on when I started doing the blue thing. So I found that you could buy blue saran wrap to kind of match our blue ink splatter. And I was like, oh, that's just cool. Like, I have to do that, you know. So I started doing the blue saran wrap kind of thing. And then I would, you know, kind of strategically package things together, wrap them all together. You know, I'd wrap it in the wintertime. We wrap an ink bottle kind of separately from everything else. So if it does break for some reason, it's rare that that happens. But if it does, then it's not going to ruin everything in the box, you know. So it's just like this combination of kind of like having that Tetris gene, you know, and also the combination of being really, really empathetic about, you know, the person that's actually receiving the end product, you know. And it's like, yeah, we use a lot of bubble wrap. And I get criticized here and there for how much stretch wrap we use and stuff. It's like, okay, I know. Like, it weighs a little bit on my conscience that I'm not like as eco-friendly as I could possibly be. But at the same time, it's not eco-friendly to have stuff break and get damaged in shipping either. So we kind of weigh it out. But I can say like we have a remarkably low rate of things that get damaged in transit. And to me, that's not just like a statistic. To me, it breaks my heart whenever anything gets damaged or lost or whatever because I know that that person that's affected by that, you know, like you, Myke, it's like you got something sitting in customs. Whoever shipped it, you're just like one of 100 things or 1,000 things or whatever they're shipping that day. And it's just a statistic for them. But like for you, like that's your thing. Like that affects you 100%. So it's the same kind of thing for me. It's like I always view like how is what I'm doing affecting that one person that this order affects 100%. And yeah, no matter how big we get. And like now, like I'm not the only one doing it. Like our packing process is largely untouched from the way I was doing it back in my garage. But like I've kind of retrained that. I'll kind of pass it down, you know, as we've hired more people. And it's become like a way of life around here, you know. And I constantly say like you can look at like these orders that we're printing out and shipping out every day. And you can zone out and you can look at them and be like, yeah, it's just another order, whatever. But like no, every single customer, you know, every single order that comes through has a person's name on it. And I was like that person is affected 100% by what you're doing. So that's like really instilled into what we do around here. So even though we're getting bigger, even though, you know, you could say like we're not the same mom and pop we used to be. Like, yeah, it's true. We're not in our garage anymore and that kind of stuff. But even still, like everything that we've tried to do as we've grown has been to try to scale the unscalable, which is to have that personal touch for everybody and to hire people and train them and grow them in our company that care as much as Rachel and I did in those early days.

Domain Registrars

Brad Dowdy: Well, you've given me the perfect segue to talk about scaling. But before we do that, I want to talk about our last sponsor, one of my favorite sponsors, Myke, and that's our friends at Hover.

Myke Hurley: Hover is amazing. They are the best and only way that you should be buying domain names. I had a call with Hover today, Brad, and they told me that the Pen Addict is one of our best performing shows. What? On the network. Yeah. Which doesn't surprise me because the Pen Addict listeners are super smart, for one. Yes. But also, and it's because you guys are really interested in blogging. And I think that that's, there's like, the Squarespace said the same thing, by the way. Right. Oh, good. So it's because the Pen Addict community is super interested in setting up their own sites because they want to be you, right? They want to be Brad Dowdy. That's what it is. Because who wouldn't want to be? It's overrated. Way overrated. Everybody wants to be Brad Dowdy. Brad Dowdy uses Hover. Now, the reason that we use Hover. Brad, why don't you tell me, actually, why do you use Hover.com?

Brad Dowdy: It's one of the most simple and straightforward domain registers I've used. You know, I've used various ones, and I've had good experiences with other domain registrars. I've had bad experiences with other domain registrars. But I've never had an easier experience than I've had with Hover. It's really, it just sounds cliche, but it's so simple, so easy, so straightforward. You find your domain that you want to buy, and you add it to your cart, and then you purchase it. And they just don't mess around with any of the nonsense that you see at a lot of other domain registrars. So, yeah, it's super easy, and that's why I use it.

Myke Hurley: This is exactly what Hover believes in. They believe in allowing you to go to their site, type in either the domain you're looking for, or some keywords for a domain that you're looking for. They'll make suggestions. They'll show you what's available across the over 200 domain options that they have. They have .com, .co, .me, .fm, .net, and all the crazy ones as well these days. .diamonds, .plumbing, .coffee. You know, you can carry on forever with what they have, but Hover have all of them, and they're really, really great prices. Like, for example, .coms, they start at $12.99, and this includes WhoisPrivacy for free as well. Now, WhoisPrivacy is what keeps your private information that you have to register with the domain registration people away from the rest of the internet. So this comes for free with Hover domains, so all of your information is kept private. This is not the case with other domain registrars. Hover have a no-hold, no-wait, no-transfer telephone support policy. They're famous for this, and it's good to see why, you know, because you want that. When you call somebody up, you want to be able to just speak to one person, they'll do it for you. But if you maybe live somewhere else or you work at crazy hours like I do, they have great email support, and they also have great documentation on their site as well, which can help you out with a bunch of stuff. So if you want to be like Brad Dowdy, go right now to Hover.com and try them out. You want to use the code ANAROCKS.

Myke Hurley: A-N-A-R-O-C-K-S. I messed up the book. I forgot about that. When you start at checkout, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase at Hover.com and show your support for The Pen Addict and all of RelayFM. That's ANAROCKS. A-N-A-R-O-C-K-S. Thank you so much to Hover for sponsoring this week's episode.

Brad Dowdy: That's hilarious. I bet she forgot about that too because I did.

Site Update

Brad Dowdy: All right. So this scaling, Brian, came to a head in the past several weeks, and you went through an enormous, enormous site update. So why don't you tell us the reasons why now is the time to go through this huge upgrade at Goulet Pens and get the site to where you want it and some of the challenges that you've hit in making this huge update.

Brian Goulet: Sure. Happy to talk about that because this is something that's affected a lot of people recently, and there's been some very passionate discussion out there in social media about our website change. You know, first thing I want to say is that I did not intentionally want to make anyone's life harder. That is an unintended consequence of just change in general. You know, we've been working on this website build for a year and a half, and this isn't just a website update. This was a whole new platform, all new architecture, all new developers, and this is literally a new platform too. What happened was we had our old site hosted on Volusion, which has about 50,000 e-commerce stores, and we were one of the bigger ones. We worked our kind of climbed our way up, and we had really kind of maxed out like every capability that that site had, and, you know, we did not have a mobile store. We could not upgrade our review system. You know, there was just no responsive design. There was just a lot of limitations that we were starting to hit as we wanted to grow. There was no opportunity to do native apps in the future. You know, we were hitting walls, and so even though the site was pretty great for where we were, you know, a couple of weeks ago, we realized that we were never going to be able to take it further on the existing site. Right. So what happened was Volusion has a new platform on their – it's their enterprise-level platform. It's called Mozu, and I guess I'm giving them a free plug right now. They'll be happy about that. But it's for the big dogs, you know what I mean? And we are like one of the small ones on the site. Like they launched a site a couple weeks before ours that has 500,000 products. You know, like that's an e-commerce store, you know, and so really we're the fourth store to launch on their platform. And what happened was they saw what we did on Volusion, and they saw how we did our recurring billing system with InkDrop. They saw the custom tools that we built with the Nibnook and Penn Plaza, and they saw, you know, the Swab Shop and how we were programming things, and we were doing so many workarounds that were never originally intended. And, you know, that code is like 10 or 12 years old on their site. You know, you have 50,000 stores on there. You're not just going to change that overnight. You know what I mean? So like in order for us to get kind of the changes that we wanted to go, we knew that we were going to have to move at some point somewhere. So we've been, you know, trying out, you know, trials of Magento and Shopify and Spree. And just we've been doing all this stuff for years on kind of behind the scenes, and nothing was really better. There were like trade-offs, like some things were better, other things were more painful than Volusion, and nothing was really better. But what happened was Mozu came to us and they said, hey, look, you guys have been rocking it on Volusion. We've got this opportunity for you to be an early adopter on our new platform. And what that means is you're going to be a little bit like astronauts. You know, it's going to be a little bit painful as we work out the kinks, but here's where we're going to be able to set you up in the future. And so it's OpenAPI, and there's all kinds of amazing things. Like basically whatever we want to do in the future, we'll be able to do because of the way the architecture is built on this site. Now, that said, it's still an amazingly complex site. And there's a lot, a lot that is involved in a website migration and an e-commerce website migration at that. I think you probably have a fairly tech-savvy audience here, so they can appreciate where I'm coming from with this. Anybody who's in web development, you know that crap just goes wrong. Like you cannot foresee some of the complications that happen. And like we had so many things that we had were perfect in our testing environment. As soon as we got to production, random crap started breaking all over the place. And it was like, what is it? Like, where is this coming from? And so like we got a team of developers that are working almost around the clock that are trying to fix these bugs. And, you know, Rachel and I are kind of running ourselves ragged a little bit at this point just to try to get as many things fixed as possible. And it's, the thing that's complicated about it is it's not just one problem. You know, it's, if you're using this browser on this device and you have an account that is so old and you transferred over something from your old wish list, this weird random thing is going to happen. You know what I mean? So it's like, that's what happens. And it's like left and right. So like every single issue that comes up, it's like, all right, what browser are you using? And you got to like be a detective every single time until you can see a pattern and kind of see. And then we can tell our developers like, okay, this is the issue, the pattern that we're seeing. And they're like, okay, okay, okay. And they can go into the code and fix these random things. You know what I mean? And it's like, that's what's going on behind the scenes. So like, honestly, it's a bit of a miracle that like the internet works at all. You know what I mean? And like, that's kind of the big secret for like anybody who does development is like the internet is fragile. It really is. But to have an e-commerce site that we, you know, we were able to migrate all of our existing customer information. So you're like your order history and all that stuff. That's like half the migration right there. You know, and then we've got, you know, 3,000 products. We've got about 30,000 images that we had to move over. We integrated the blog into the website as well, which was a whole other thing. So it's like, you know, it's an amazingly complex dance that we're doing. And the fact that we got some bugs and stuff, like, it's been really stressful because I know it's coming at like the worst time for people to, right before the holidays too. Originally, our launch date was in June. And it got pushed out and pushed out and pushed out and pushed out. That's why we didn't announce that we had a new site coming until it was like eminent because it was like we did not want to be that company that said, hey, we're developing a new website. Oh, wait, next month. Oh, wait, next month. Oh, wait, next month. You know, so we intentionally kept it secret for this whole time until we like had to cancel InkDrop and stop the recurring program because we had to, you know, basically change everything about it for the new site. And it was like it was to the point where like we couldn't keep it secret anymore because, you know, people would be left in the dark about InkDrop. So that's kind of like where we are now is we're working on these bugs. Like seriously, stuff is getting fixed every day. We are handling those things. We love getting the feedback. It's hard to get the feedback, but we love getting it, you know. And, you know, that's something that we are trying desperately to work through right now. But the reason for it, kind of the overall purpose behind the whole site move, it wasn't because we had like some competitor that's on our heels that we're worried about. It wasn't because we're greedy and we just want to be huge. Really, it's because, you know, the kind of the spirit of what we created our site in the first place was to just me and Rachel, we have ideas, we have gifts, we are really passionate for our fountain pen community and just we're really into this stuff. We have things that we still want to do. We have ideas. We want to take it further. Not because we want to run a bigger company or we want to get recognized for anything. You know, I don't even care about that stuff. For me, it's just I want to do the best that I can do with what I've been given. That's kind of like my overall life philosophy, right? Stewardship. So for me, this website was an opportunity that came about that I knew was kind of a once in a lifetime thing. And I knew it was going to be hard and I knew some people wouldn't understand it. And it saddens me that these issues, you know, I know we're losing customers for life over some of these issues. But I hope that we've deposited enough into the trust bank, as I call it, so that people are not going to leave forever. They'll see that this is a temporary thing. And right now we're making some withdrawals out of that trust bank. We've been building it up for five years. I've been putting out videos for five years, trying every single customer interaction to add value to their lives. You know, and yes, I get rewarded with that when people buy from my store. That's how I stay in business. But from this point forward, it's more about trying to help people, trying to further fountain pens. And, you know, realizing that, like, I'm not just some guy in his bedroom anymore. Like, people actually listen to what I say. And I have to be very intentional about some of the moves that I make. You know, just because, you know, there are people that look up to my situation. And I don't take that lightly at all. So the website was an opportunity for us to move forward for the next five years so that five years from now we can have conversations on this podcast again on episode 3511. Right. Or whatever. For sure. And we can say, man, do you remember how crazy it was five years ago when you changed your website in the middle of the 2014 holiday season? That was insane. But look at what's come of it now. And, you know, some of the things that we've got now, like even some of the wins that we have right now, we have a review system that I'm so excited about because it's a review system that we were able to customize on like a per product basis. So for ink, you can go in, when you review an ink, you can talk about the water resistance. You can talk about the flow. You can talk about the dry time. Those are all things that you can review. So my grandiose vision is to make it an even better resource for the fountain pen community in general to be able to share each other's knowledge and benefit from other people who've experienced these products and have something to weigh in on. You know, product reviews are extremely important. But what's a four-star rating on a bottle of ink? You know, you don't really know. But when you can rate the water resistance and you got 100 reviews of water resistance, you can say, yeah, you know what? The manufacturer doesn't say it's water resistant, but it is. Because 100 people that are using it say it is. You know, I'm limited in my resources. I'm one guy. I can't review 600 inks. But the whole fountain pen community can. And if I can build an environment that can allow people to share that information in one place, that is pretty powerful. And that's the kind of things that I'm thinking about in the next five years is building the kind of the community and giving them one place. And it's very convenient that it's one place where they can buy my products, right? That's, again, I'm not trying to make that a secret. Like, I have no ulterior motive here. I keep my company running when people buy from my store. Right. That's the kind of, like, relationship that I have here is, like, you know, I will provide you the best experience I possibly can. And you, if you think that it's worth it, buy my products at my store. But even still, you can read my reviews and you can go buy it on Amazon if you want to, you know? It doesn't, like, thrill me when that happens, but I'm realistic. Sure. That stuff happens all the time, you know? Sure. But that's okay because I believe in humanity, I believe in people, and I believe that when I put myself out there personally and people see, like, how much I care and that it's me, that it's, you know, and that I have a team of 24 people here that all care as much as I do about this stuff. You know, that's something that I think transcends just a low price, you know, which seems to be the algorithm that everybody's kind of working towards in, you know, the e-commerce searches. It's not always about low price. It's, you know, it's about value. And even if I can't be the most rock-bottom price, if I can add the most value, then I give people a reason to support me.

Brad Dowdy: Yeah, I couldn't believe in that philosophy more. And, you know, I appreciate the openness and honesty about the difficulties, you know, with the site upgrade. And actually, we talked a week or so ago, and I'm like, you sure you don't want to push this back a little bit? And you're like, no, we just, it's not going to change, so we should just do it. And, you know, you were super, super great about that. So, and I totally believe in the trust bank philosophy, too. I'm a big believer in that. And I think certainly over the years, you have, you have built up more than enough credits in the trust bank for people to understand that, you know, this type of change is inevitable. And it's only going to make things better in the long run.

Brian Goulet: That's, that's what I'm shooting for, man.

Brad Dowdy: Yep. Yep. So I'm going to get you out, get you out of here on one little, one little fun topic. And, and we'll call it a wrap because this has been an awesome conversation and we could go on for another hour or two. But I want to, I want to get your, I want to get Brian Goulet's favorite pen and favorite ink. You're going, you're going home tonight. You're going to write a letter to, to your kids when they graduate high school and you want to make it, you know, this great looking letter. And you were going to have a, you want to enjoy the, the, the process of using an awesome pen to write it with and a great ink that, you know, is, is going to look great on the page. So what pen and ink, just one, one of each. Oh, that's your favorite right now.

Brad Dowdy: You're making me stick to one. Oh God. Yeah. One pen and one, you're just, you're just going to write this one letter. And when you get home tonight and it's going to be very important. So what pen and ink are you taking home with you?

Brian Goulet: Oh my gosh, man. You're killing me. Just so you know, just so you know, I carry about 15 pens on me everywhere I go. Like I just can't. Yeah. You know, it's just, I have like hundreds of pens in my personal collection and I just, I'm hopelessly addicted. Like it's, it's the worst and the best working in my position as I am. Cause like, I just got in like the Pilot Custom 912s today and with like all these crazy nibs. And I'm like, dang it. Like, which one am I going to want? Like, you know, it's like, it's like a foregone conclusion. Like I have to have one of these pens myself. So it's, you know, I'm constantly changing out pens. I'm constantly changing out ink and stuff like that because I love the discovery. You know, for me, it's still fresh. It's still new. I've been doing it for five years, but I still love every new thing that comes through here. You know? Yeah. That's the truth. Yeah. I actually have, I don't know when this podcast is going to publish. I just shot a video today. That's like this ridiculous video because we have so many new products that landed at once. I couldn't, I literally couldn't shoot a video on each one separately. So I shot, I called it like a new product extravaganza or whatever. And it's 12 new products that we're launching in a week, like epic things like red pilot falcons and custom nine 12s and the TWSBI 580 all in orange and, you know, the TWSBI red and green and this Invincia deluxe stainless steel that we had. Like, it's like epic bomb dropping things that are like so hitting so close together right at the holidays. I was like, all right, I'm just going to get all done in one video. Boom. You know? So that was fun. Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent. I don't know why I talked about that, but. That's all right.

Brad Dowdy: Because you were talking about you can't narrow it down. There's too much good stuff.

Brian Goulet: Well, okay, no, I'm not going to. That's a, that's a, that's a cop out answer. Okay. So, I mean, I've talked a lot before. My loyal, my loyal fans will know exactly what I'm about to say. The pen would have to be my blue Pilot Custom 74 with a medium nib. Um, I just, you know, it's not, it's, it's weird. Cause like that pen for, as an all encompassing pen is not my favorite. Like there's other pens that I like the design a lot better or the weight or whatever. But the way that that pen writes and the fact that I've been using it religiously for like four years now, I just, it means so much to me. It's, it's been through so much with me. I wrote many of my early thank you notes on those Goulet pens orders personally with that pen. So it's like, to me, pretty much no matter what else comes out, that pen will, will always kind of have a special place in my heart. But if it wasn't that one, it would be like the next new pen that I'm looking at. Right. Cause like I get so excited about whatever it is. Um, and then the ink would, would easily have to be Noodler's Liberty's Elysium. Um, um, that is a shameless plug because it's an exclusive ink that I helped design with Nathan Tardif. Um, I have a very special relationship with Nathan Tardif. He's the, the, the one man behind Noodler's ink. Um, he is an incredible human being and love him or hate him, which a lot of people do both. Uh, he is an incredible man. And I, uh, the, the fountain pen world would not be what it is without Nathan Tardif. There's no question about that. Um, but I had the opportunity to design this ink with him. What I wanted was a Goulet blue ink that is permanent. And, uh, we ended up not being able to get it to be a hundred percent permanent. So we had to settle for like partially bulletproof, but you know what? I'll take it. Um, we did through a few, several formulations. There was a little drama around that too, but we settled on. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. You remember that. That was a couple of years ago, but we settled on the current formulation, which is the best one that we could find based on physics. Right. Right. And, uh, so it's, it's a Goulet blue permanent ink. I signed like my house deed in that ink, you know, like in my will, like I've signed those things in that ink. And, um, and it's, it's a Patrick Henry themed ink. You know, Nathan's a big history buff. I live like, you know, a 10 minute drive from the birthplace of Patrick Henry. You know, I'm a big Virginia history kind of, you know, I'm not a big history buff, but like I super appreciate it. You know what I mean? Big George Washington fan, Patrick Henry, all that. So to have that theme tied around that with the Goulet blue, with the relationship with Nathan Tardif, plus the fact that it's just a really awesome ink, um, that hands down, like that combination blue custom 74 with Liberty's Elysium. That's perfect.

Brad Dowdy: That's perfect. I like it. I like it a lot. So, and it's good. I mean, that's, that's meaningful stuff and that, and that's what it's all about. You know, these, these pins and inks that, you know, you may carry around 15 pins, but they, you know, a lot of it is like really meaningful and you can remember times when you were using these pins and, you know, you remember what you signed with this ink and things like that. So that's, that's really great. So exactly, exactly. Very good. Well, Brian, I, I can't thank you enough for the time you took out of an extremely busy schedule to, uh, to join me and Myke today. And I know the, uh, the fans of the show have been clamoring for it for a while. And, um, I feel like we just scratched the surface still. And, um, we could, we could, we will definitely have to do this again down the line and, uh, kind of pick up from where we left off and talk about all kinds of different things. So we appreciate you coming on today. Thank you so much, man.

Brian Goulet: Thank you.

Myke Hurley: Totally.

Brad Dowdy: Happy to do it anytime.

Myke Hurley: Where can people, uh, keep up with what you're up to?

Brian Goulet: Well, gosh, uh, gulet pens.com is my website. Um, it's also got my blog on there. Technically the blog is blog.guletpens.com, but it's all lumped into kind of the same place. Um, I post a lot of stuff. Um, I've done close to 1100 blog posts at this point, so you can read it to your heart's content. So all my videos are embedded on the blog there too. But you can also check out my YouTube channel. Um, you can look up the Goulet Pen Company on YouTube and find my channel there with hundreds of videos. Um, I'm also available on Twitter, uh, at guletpens on Twitter or on personally. Uh, I have a different handle, uh, Brian Goulet underscore. Somebody else got Brian Goulet without the underscore. And they don't even tweet. Anyway, a little rant. Um, uh, we're on Instagram. We're on Pinterest. We're on, you know, Fountain Pen Network. We're on Reddit. We're on, I'm leaving stuff out, Facebook. I mean, just look us up, Goulet Pen Company. You can see us from our media page. We link to all that stuff on our website. Um, lots of different ways to get in touch with us.

Myke Hurley: And if you'd like to get in touch with me and Brad, I'm on Twitter. I'm at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. And Brad is at dowdyism, D-O-W-D-Y-I-S-M. And of course, Brad writes the fantastic penaddict.com. If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode, which has loads of great links as to all the stuff that we've spoken about today, go to relay.fm slash penaddict slash one three one. Thanks again to our sponsors this week, Linda, Karis Customs, and Hover. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Brad. Goodbye, Brad. And you can say goodbye too, Mr. Goulet.

Brian Goulet: Goodbye too, Mr. Goulet. I had to do it, Brad did it.