Editing The Pen Addict 431/transcript (section)

== Kickstarter Update ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' True.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You know? And you're not going to have to skimp and save on it because you didn't make the money that you needed. Oh, sure. You know? So you're actually staying true to what the thing is. So, you know, and that's like, I think that that is just a very sensible way of doing things for businesses of our size. Right. Rather than like hoping you'll make it up in volume or, you know, having like, actually having a bunch of your own cash that you can invest in it. It's like, no, this is like, this thing needs to happen. I need to raise money for it. I'm going to sell you product at a good price for it. If I don't make the goal, then the thing's never going to get done. Simple as.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yep. Yep.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Let's segue into some more, I guess this is customer facing decisions made by a certain company that we love. And I stumbled on this. I forget what I was looking for at the time. I was looking for an answer for something. Oh, I know what I was looking for. It's going to come up later in the King of Pen review that we talk about today. I was looking, I was actually looking for the proper spelling or the proper, you know, pluralization of King of Pen. So we'll hold that for the later section.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Ah, is it King of Pen or King of Pens, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, we're going to, there's a whole thing on that that I didn't even write up. So where do you go to sort this thing out? You go to Sailor's website, right? Mm-hmm. So I jumped on Sailor's website this weekend and I was hit with a homepage.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And I didn't share this with you before the document, before I put it in the document. But I haven't talked to you about this. I'm not even going to say what it is yet. But when you click that link, I want to know your thoughts and what you found.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, it's, can I say what it is?

'''Myke Hurley:''' You can say what it is.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So Sailor have rebranded or at least have tweaked their branding.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think it looks fantastic. So they've effectively changed the overall look of the anchor. I guess they've kind of made it a little chunkier. There's something about this which kind of says like anime to me. I don't know why. I can't explain why. But I really like the treatment of the new text.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Again, it feels very like open seas to me, the text. There's like an almost like mystical pirate nature to it. That's kind of the way that I'm feeling about it. I like it. I like it a lot.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I am a little bit surprised that I agree with you on the anchor. I think the anchor is pretty darn good. Yeah. I didn't expect to say that because if you grabbed one of your pins right now in front of you, Myke, and you know, one of your pro gears and you look at that anchor on the finial, you're like, man, that is a good logo, isn't it? Like we always talk about Sailor's logo.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Now looking at the difference for them, right? Mm-hmm. The old logo just looks like a nice anchor.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The new logo is much more stylized. It is. In a way that I like. And I think actually looks a little bit more like a fountain pen nib.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Mm-hmm. Yeah. I just, I, the, the lines of the anchor really work for me. They do lose me a little bit in the word mark. I'm not in love with the A.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The A is weird. I will give you that. If I was going to say there's a part of this I don't like, it's the A because they don't have any joining line in the A. Like that go, like the horizontal line in the A, which I think is a weird choice.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Because like in the, in, we've got two links in the show notes. It's only Japanese. But there's one which is the announcement of the branding. And then one which is the website that features the new branding. Mm-hmm. And if you look at the announcement page, they've put the Sailor logo on a horizon line. Yes. And the horizon line puts the line in the A. Yes. And it looks good. It's like, well, that, you can see it's an A. But then when you look in the top left-hand corner, it doesn't have that. And I would say it is missing that. I think that that is the one criticism that I have whilst I do like it overall. The other thing that I like about the logo, Brad, is it looks like it was made with a fountain pen. In the sense that it's like a lot of line whip variation that I like too. But, yeah, I think they've missed a little bit on the A. But overall, I think this is a, I wouldn't say a needed refresh. But I would say a welcome one.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Right. And if you go through the translated version, and it's definitely, you can see that the new company, the new ownership has taken some, you know, good looks at what Sailor is doing, and kind of wanted to put their own stamp on it is what I'm guessing this came about. And you saw the exact same thing that I saw. Like the Sailor logo and word mark on the ocean image looks cool. Then you look at the top on the website image, and to me it looks like a stencil. I like, I get the line width variations. I think the word mark is going to grow on me. I'm down with the anchor. Like I really like the anchor. I think it's pretty sharp and pretty clean. And, you know, in the size we see the anchor on the pen, it's going to look very similar. You know, it's going to depend on what they do with like the cap bands and some of the other things. Like when they did the, when Sailor a few years ago tried to over-modernize the, what was it, the Pro Gear lineup with that, I don't even forget the name because it was such a bad pen, and they've closed them out, but they did that really weird shaped clip and just tried to make like, it's basically like Sailor Pro Gear modern version number two. And it just didn't hit. And because the classic design is just that, like it's a classic. Everyone knows what Sailor's clip looks like and what their finial looks like and what their cap bands look like. And then they tried to do this modern version of it and it didn't really play well. So we're just going to have to see where this ends up in the long run. I'm pretty positive on it overall. Like I said, I think we're pretty much on the same page.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I have continued enthusiasm for the new owners of Sailor because all of the early changes that they're making, I agree with. Like the product lines that they've slimmed down, they've trimmed the fat and got rid of the products that don't make any sense, right? So we've seen that already, right, over the last couple of months. I think a modernization or a refresh of the brand is a good idea. Like I was just looking at the old Sailor logo and especially the way that the text was written. It's so boring. Like it doesn't say anything, you know?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm going to have to see on this, like on the cap bands. Like I'm just looking at the cap bands is my sticking point. Because like you said, you know, on my custom Rialo that I got with the Pizza Planet logo, like we're not many steps away from the Pizza Planet logo on the cap band.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The thing is though, Brad, the Sailor logo on the cap band, like the text logo, is not Sailor's logo. I know, it's a text. It's in a different font. Yeah, I'm with you. So they weren't doing that anyway, which now I think about that is wild to me. The text logo that they have used is not the same as the one that they actually print on the pens. Why do they do that?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Now you've got me concerned.