Editing The Pen Addict 435/transcript (section)

== Follow-Up Topic ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. Ready to get into some follow-up. I have a decent amount of follow-up from a single topic. Last week I went down. A little rabbit hole. So we talked about the TWSBI Eco Golden Horse last week as just one of those one-off TWSBI limited edition things they did for a small batch. And I guess they had some extras and they've sent them. They were selling them. And what I found interesting about the pen that we discussed last week is the build parts of the Eco. And as a transparent pen or a mostly transparent pen, you get to see like all the ins and outs of how the pen is built. And I thought this Golden Horse model was a little bit different than the standard Eco. I thought it looked like to me it used some of the 580 parts in the piston section. And I find that kind of thing like super interesting. Like they're still calling it the Eco. And I can really tell that this is fully an Eco pen. So I thought about, you know, could I get one? And I found one. So I have one on order. And, you know, there's a couple of shops that had it for sale. Someone linked to me a shop in Australia, but they weren't shipping out of the country at the time. So they had the Eco Golden Horse. I'm not sure what all shops and why some shops got them, but I found it at Most Wanted Pens, which is a German shop. And, Myke, if you're familiar, this is the Kaweco adjacent shop run by Michael Guprele, the owner of Kaweco. His son, Sebastian Guprele. Oh, yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' This was the place that I got the Kaweco sleeve for the Apple Pencil.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I got it from here because this place had them first.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. So not a shock that they get all the good Kaweco stuff first, right? They have – it's basically – I don't want to say it's like an affiliate, but it's basically the right arm. It's almost like the retail spot for Kaweco. And they do some limited edition stuff there that you can't get anywhere else, which, like, I'm fine with. That's cool. I've ordered some limited edition, a pen or two from them before because I couldn't get it in the U.S. and I really wanted it. So, anyway, I forget what brought me there. It might have even just come up on a Google search when I was poking around. And I was like, oh, it's in stock, so let me order it. So I have that coming. It's already shipped, I think. I ordered it, like, I think Monday.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I don't know if I'll have it for next week. But it's just one of those pens that I don't know if I actually want the pen, like, per se, for, like, my own library of pens. But I want to break it down. It's like one of the few times I'm interested in looking at the breakdown of the pen and say, hey, does this eco use all the eco parts? I don't know why this fascinates me so much. It probably fascinates almost no one else. But it does. It does to me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You know it. You know it. Lots of people listening to this show are as interested as we are.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Of course. Yeah, yeah. But, like, this is a silly little rabbit hole. Like, this is a meaningless rabbit hole, right? This means nothing. I am just curious. So I am, you know, trying to fulfill my curiosity. So I got that on order. So I appreciate y'all reaching out for other links. And, you know, if you're in Australia, I can send you the link if you want to try to buy this pen or whatever. It's not a cheap eco. It's like an 80 plus dollar. It was 110 euros. It cost me like 80 or 90 dollars. Like, this is a very expensive eco. So we'll see what it's all about once I get it in. But when I was there, once I figured out I was on Most Wanted Pens, I obviously scrolled through the rest of their site because there's usually some weird Kaweco stuff in there. And I noticed one thing that they sell at Most Wanted Pens, and I'm not sure any other Kaweco dealers do. And I haven't looked and I haven't vetted this, but I thought it was so strange to see for sale individual front end sections for Kaweco Sports. Not just the nib unit, right? You can get the nib units from anywhere, all of your favorite retailers. But they sell like the entire front end, the color grip section and everything as a separate part. And I've never seen that before. So maybe some other stores do that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't even think I knew that you could take them off. I guess you can. That's how you would put – yeah, of course you can. So, excuse me. That's where the cartridge goes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think the funny thing here, though, is like, because you can look through it. So the website has, like – it's not just Kaweco. They actually have this for a couple of different pens. But Kaweco is maybe unique here. But you could end up creating your own Frankenstein Kawecos from these kinds of parts, couldn't you? You could mix and match the colors.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And that's what caught my eyes because we have talked about this before. And I've written about it in Refill of how, hey, you can customize your Kaweco. Just if you have two Kawecos, you can just swap those parts on there and make a different section. Like, they have a clear section, right? So, or it's like a frosted. So they did this, it looks like, for the Frosted series mostly. And so they have the clear, the yellow, the pink, the blue. And so they might not match as well with the solid colors. But I thought it was cool to see them have done that because that's something I talked about, right? That is something that I think is a feature of the Kaweco Sports. And I like seeing that. I was like, huh, that's cool. I didn't bother going to check. Like, okay, does, you know, Cult Pens offer this? Does Jet Pens offer this? Do all these shops offer this? I didn't go look. But I'm assuming they don't because I think I might have run across it before. So, yeah, I'll be interested to see if it's just that one specific run of pen, which is like six different colors of that model. And I don't know. It just brings up a lot of questions. It's, again, it's the TWSBI Eco Golden Horse question in my head. It's like, okay, why are they doing this? Why just these sections? Why don't they, if they're going to do these sections, why not do the standard colors like the white, the black, the blue, the red, you know, the classic sport colors? It's, you know, why only these colors? Was there extra parts? You know, I'm sitting here rambling all this in my head.

'''Myke Hurley:''' There is a certain level of being an enthusiast in which you start to care a lot about what the companies in that industry do. You know, like I have this with technology, right? I don't just care about the products. I care about the decisions the companies make. And this is a similar thing, right? Which is like, you could if you wanted to, and it would probably be, I don't know, easier in some ways, to just care about like the color of the Kawekos. But it's also, there is an extra level, a higher tier of interest where you're like, why did this company make this decision? It's just like a different type of being an enthusiast as you start to go to that additional level as you just care more and more about digging deeper into the hobby that you're in. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So two final things on this little topic. They call these the front part, right? So this is the front part. The part name is the front part. So that's very interesting to me. And two, the cost of these is almost exactly half of the overall pin cost. And I'd argue that that's fair. That seems, that's where the bulk of the cost goes. It's where the stuff is, isn't it? Yeah, it's where the stuff lives.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You can imagine that actually being expensive. The acrylic is not that expensive. And especially you make it at scale, you know.