Editing The Pen Addict 606/transcript (section)

== Monteverde Ritma Gala Convertible Pocket Neck Fountain Pen ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' So the first thing that caught my eye was the second pen listed which is the Monteverde Ritma Gala Convertible Pocket Neck Fountain Pen. Big name here. But you look at the picture. Easy for you to say. Yeah. But basically what caught my eye was the picture, right? I'm not familiar with this pen but it's basically a necklace pen. Like it's a classic design from like the early 1900s. You saw a lot of these necklace type pens. But the strap immediately reminded me of like, oh, that's kind of like a Y Studio thing in a larger fashion and then you scroll down and there's actually the Y Studio Brassing Portable Ballpoint Pens which is a really fun, really great pen. You usually don't see them on sale which that's a really neat pen to consider if you like a ballpoint and a unique barrel. It's like, it's a heavy brass barrel pen, faceted, I think six-sided pen and really neat. I'm pretty sure I've reviewed that on the blog and of course being the Y Studio fanboy that I am, I really enjoyed it. Then there's two Viscontis that caught my eye because they kind of shouldn't be in here. The Visconti Woodstock, the material that they have here is really, really nice and I've seen a bunch of pictures of these and they look spectacular and the price is ridiculous for what it is and then completely unfair to me, the Visconti Kaleido Fountain Pen and Fire Opal is now very discounted and that's, they have the nib size that I like and it's going to be problematic so just something to think about out there at penchalet.com some really neat stuff.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Some, just a couple of things that caught my eye, a couple of models of the stipulated Caplus, DaVinci Caplus pens at some bananas prices so if that was like a mechanism you were interested in trying out there's some really good prices in those pens as well.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Interesting,

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm looking at them now. Wow. Yeah, that's very cool. Really great prices in those. So that is P-E-N-C-H-A-L-E-T.com click the podcast link at the top of the website and enter the password Pen Addict. With Pen Chalet you'll get free shipping on orders of over $75 in the US and they sell internationally as well with very reasonable shipping rates. Pen Chalet has low prices and high quality pens and offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee. A thanks to Pen Chalet for the support of this show and Relay FM.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Alright Myke, we have our shout out of the week. Shout out of the week. I need a pen store. Myke, what a good name. Have you heard about Pen Chalet? Have you heard about our friends at Pen Chalet? But no, this is, so Frank at Fontaplumo put up basically like a travel guide for if you're in, you know, you're traveling and you want to find out if there's a pen store around you, you can check out I Need a Pen Store. So, that's a really cool kind of one-stop place we'll certainly reference. We always get a traveling question, hey, is there a map of stationery stores? And this is a place, this is a website where you can, you know, search by shop name, you can search by location you're in, you can search by manufacturer to see what shops might carry a manufacturer. So, yeah, it's a really neat setup and tool for all of us who are looking for pen shops if we're traveling on the road. Maybe see something we haven't been familiar with before and I just wanted to give Frank a shout out for putting this out there. It's really neat.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Excellent.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Excellent. All right, Myke, when you're traveling the world, you might need to keep track of the time and the various time zones you're in. So, what if I told you that there was a watch that could help you with that and it was stationery adjacent in that it was a collaboration with the pen addict and our friends over at Notice created a watch very cool called the Sector Dive GMT pen addict edition. So, this might come as a surprise to a lot of people. It is a little bit out of left field. Out of left field but we have been working on this for months behind the scenes and by we I mean my friend Michael Harris who along with the pen addict slack watches board worked with Notice to make a pen addict you don't want to say branded but like themed themed styled yeah inspired it's orange and stainless and it looks awesome and it's got

'''Myke Hurley:''' the pen addict logo on the back as well

'''Brad Dowdy:''' on the back side yeah so we kept that subtly on the back I mean it's large on the back but it's not something you see right but that's the place you're more of a watch person than me that's the place where you get like the little extra details addition details you know whatever particulars you get on the back and things like that so the notice sector dive GMT yeah came about from the watches channel and I got involved through Michael wanting to basically wanting my approval it's like I don't know anything about this y'all do this and one of my approval I'm like heck yeah he like gave me some mock ups and and and showed it to me so yeah it looks super good one of my goals with this was the charity portion so fifty dollars of every sale is going to our friends at st. jude to help children cancer research so like I'm making zero dollars on this right this is a not-for-profit product if you will like I like I get zero dollars out of this I'm actually buying mine at full price right like and then fifty dollars of that is going to st. Jude so this is a really cool thing and what I did and what Michael had such a great experience working with notice and one of the co-founders Wesley Kwok I had the opportunity to sit with Wesley learn more about notice learn how this watch came about and kind of pick his brain on the brand and how their business works and so for the first time ever Myke and I are going to step away while I interview Wesley in the podcast so we're going to cut in this interview and then we'll be back once it's done all right everyone we're doing something a little different today I am being joined online by Wes Kwok from notice watches how's it going today Wes it's

'''Wes Kwok:''' going thanks for having me

'''Brad Dowdy:''' yeah absolutely so this is very interesting to me I usually pride myself on being like a top tier interviewer and getting all the good questions in and I realized it's because I'm always interviewing stationery people so this time I get to interview a watch person and I am not super dialed into the watch scene so it's going to be fun talking to you about the project that you have helped myself Michael from the stationery world himself and the slack watches channel which we'll talk about in a second so thank you for doing this and I guess I want to get

'''Wes Kwok:''' it was a big time gap in our memory but it's been seven years now since we started doing this still feels like we're the new guys and so our specialty and focus over the past seven years has really been sport watches for a very specific reason which I'll get into in a little bit but personally we've been me and my co-founder Cullen who's not on this podcast but you're eventually going to meet him he and I had met when we were 13 12 or 13 years old so we're childhood friends I like to say that we actually started becoming business partners way back then because I was the only other guitar player in our grade and he was the only other guitar player in the grade so we were like well I guess we're going to start a band and like literally the day that we met I rolled up to his house and he showed up wearing a purple Megadeth sweater and I was like alright we're going to be friends and since then we started working together playing music writing music we actually ended up the first thing that we actually put together ourselves was a guitar we built a guitar in I think it was 10th grade 9th or 10th grade and that's when I realized I at the same time but not coordinated we both got into watches and it wasn't until we met up a couple years later and we noticed that the other guy was wearing a watch when we were like hey I guess we've got more than music in common ended up talking about nothing but watches just became obsessed with watches and then fast forward to 2017 actually 2016 is when the conversation started but fast forward a few years and we were like hey we don't have a mortgage yet we don't have a wife no kids that we know of so this is the time if we're going to do something risky something that we have full ownership of this is the time to do it so we just designed a watch that we would want to wear I guess the initial idea we had was let's design a watch and make one for each of us and after that we'll go off and get a real job but we learned very quickly as I'm sure that you know from the pen world it becomes extremely expensive if you make one or two but if you make hundreds in our case it was 500 it brings the cost down becomes a little bit more reasonable so logically the

'''Wes Kwok:''' it did not work out that perfectly I think we ended up selling like 200 or something like that because the quality was just terrible we didn't know anything about making a watch or designing a watch but we got to keep our two watches each and it did well enough where we were like all right I guess people have you know they're interested in what we have to say and the work that we were doing so we did another watch and just kept it going

'''Brad Dowdy:''' did you have a particular style that you wanted to create for yourselves like between you and Colin did you have like a certain aesthetic that you were trying to land on were you trying to be like very classic or experimental or what was the thought process like around like the first watch

'''Wes Kwok:''' yeah at the time and

'''Wes Kwok:''' all the rage was vintage inspired design so straight lines not a lot of chamfurs not very complex case design you know like it wasn't it basically was made in the style of watches from 50s and 60s that was the big thing back then which is cool looks good but it wasn't really our style we wanted to do something a little bit more modern with sharper lines maybe a little bit more complex cases and so we started going down that path through that first project we found out that there are actually quite a lot of limitations not so much based on what physically possible to do but more so what type of machinery we can get access to how much we're willing to pay for these things and so we started running a lot of experiments with our factories and we flew out to our

'''Wes Kwok:''' shaking hands is important to get to know them but we wanted to show them that the American way of doing things is to innovate and push the envelope a little bit and if we want a long term relationship they would have to be willing to do some crazy experiments for us with the expectation that it's going to fail and it's not going to end up in a commercially viable spot and

'''Wes Kwok:''' we love doing it because as watch enthusiasts we love seeing new things we love innovating before notice we loved seeing innovative design innovative mechanisms things like that and we wanted to do what we could to try to push that forward for the American industry

'''Brad Dowdy:''' at what point did you or you and Cullen together realize that you had something was it in that first batch of watches that made you want to push forward or was this several watches down the line and a lot of debt accumulation I think we got it now

'''Wes Kwok:''' I know specifically which watch it was it was our fourth release it's called the Avalon and we actually still have it in our store we still make it we gone through a few versions of it we did a bronze version and now we're on the redesign of the platform but

'''Wes Kwok:''' most painful year in my entire life but definitely in notice's life and it was Thanksgiving day when we launched it in preparation for the following day Black Friday and I threw a party which is a terrible day to do a launch because you have to make the turkey and entertain all your guests so that morning woke up early put the turkey in the oven and then I went straight upstairs to the office and all my friends from childhood were coming over and they were drinking downstairs and I was upstairs with Cullen taking pictures getting the site ready pretty much the entire day we finally launched the watch at 930 at night on Thanksgiving day and then we rejoined the party and got the shots out and everything but I remember that day when we hit live it was one of those

'''Wes Kwok:''' in our business where we closed the computer we looked at each other and we were like if this does well we go all in this is the make it or break it moment in our business and if tomorrow we don't hit our goal tomorrow let's make the watch deliver it and start to wind down and pack it up and so had that conversation went down got way too drunk !

'''Wes Kwok:''' So at that point we were like people do what we're doing let's go all in at this point