Editing The Pen Addict 166/transcript (section)

== Pen Chalet Sponsorship ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, this is a company that understands, right? Yeah. Because Pen Chalet is sponsored with us every couple of weeks. And it's because they know that by sponsoring this show, they are getting their products out in front of a great audience like the one that we have. People that want to know about this stuff, you know, because we look for these companies. We try and find them online and sometimes they can be harder. They can be hidden away. But we have Pen Chalet right here to talk to you about right now. This company is fantastic. They sell all the stuff that you're looking for. Roller balls, fountain pens, ballpoints, mechanical pencils, and so much more. They have all the brands that you love. Pelican, Lamy, Pilot, Namiki, Sailor, Kaweco, all of them. If you need it, they got it and they're an authorized dealer. They're adding new stuff all the time. New models, new pens, new brands are always coming on board at Pen Chalet. They're very fast and reliable customer service. Brad, do you remember that? I think we got that in an email or a tweet the other day. Do you remember that?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so I was actually wanting to talk about this and I didn't talk with you about it, but I was going to interject at some point. So one of our listeners had a conversation with Ron at Pen Chalet about an issue with Lamy 2000. And this kind of goes, Jonathan, with one of your posts about how you build a relationship with a vendor. That's a more recent post of yours. And how that relationship is what drives a lot of people to continue purchasing from that vendor. And what happened was Lamy shipped out a batch of 2000s where there was like almost a material mismatch from the cap to the barrel. And one of Pen Chalet's orders and one of our listeners, he received one. He went back to Ron and said, hey, this looks a little bit weird. Ron immediately.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You know, I actually think he didn't even get it. I think Ron emailed the guy.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, he stopped it. He stopped it saying, hey. Which I think is even better.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So like I had an order in and then Ron emailed him and was like, do you like this is there is a problem that's happened. Do you want me to still send this out or do you want to wait? Like it was really cool.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, yeah. Ron was like, I don't want to send this out. And I've already talked to Lamy and I'm going to have a new batch in within a week. You know, I just want to tell you, you know, you're going to be delayed a week. But the reason is because I'm not happy with the product that I'm going to send you. So, you know, I, you know, if you're acceptable to this and of course the, the customer is like, well, I'm ecstatic with that because that's what, you know, I would hope a retailer like Pen Chalet would do for me as a customer. So it was a really cool, it was a really cool thing that, that took place. And we got involved with that on Twitter. And it was just really neat to see a vendor like that, you know, just kind of taking the bulls by the horns and handling problems before they become problems.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because you know what would have been easier? Just sending it and hoping the guy didn't notice. Yep. Right. That would have been easier. But that is not what Pen Chalet believe in because they, they believe in customer service. Like they, they say it, we say it every week. They have a 100% satisfaction guarantee. They want to honor this, right? So one of the best ways they do that is by thinking about what the customer might want before they even send the product out the door. I love this company. They are so fantastic. They sell everything you're going to look for. And what I always ask you to do is if there's a pen that you hear about or a pen that you're looking for, go to Pen Chalet first and see if they have it, right? Because you're going to be able to get 10% off if you use the code Pen Addict, right? Any or any purchase at Pen Chalet, you can get 10% off if you use the code Pen Addict. Don't forget to do free shipping on orders of over $50 to your content and to the United States. They also sell internationally and they have really reasonable shipping rates there too. And of course, you'll benefit on the exchange rates that you're going to get, right? Because sometimes it's cheaper to buy things in dollars than it would be to maybe buy things in pounds or euros or maybe even Australian dollars. I don't know, Jonathan, what the exchange rate is like at the moment. I think it's probably good. It's terrible.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Sorry.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Hey, if anyone knows, it's The Economist.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But what you should also do, because I have a couple of deals for you this week. If you go to PenChalet.com, click the podcast link at the top of the website and enter the password Pen Addict. As well as getting your 10% off, you'll be able to get some special offers for Pen Addict listeners along with the loads of offers that they always have here when you go through to this portal. But we have this week a Pilot Custom 74 in the smoke color with a fine nib. So this model is 30% off plus the 10% coupon. So you'll be able to pick that up for $126 or the Pilot Falcon in black and with the rhodium trim with a medium nib. We have that for 25% off plus the 10% coupon, bringing that down to $121.50. So it's those specific models, but they're absolutely fantastic deals and some great pens there.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. So the last time they offered up the Custom 74, I picked up the orange one. That was the one I bought during the episode. So, you know, I'm a fan of the Custom 74 and a fan of the Falcon. I use both of those pens in heavy, heavy rotation. So, yeah, you can't really go wrong with these Pilot gold nib pens, and that's a really good price.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Thank you so much to Pen Chalet for sponsoring this week's episode.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So I want to get into this brand taxonomy. And really, it's kind of a jumping off point. I think it's kind of the entry point into what you're doing as a blog. You know, that's just my view of it. You may have a different opinion on that, and other readers might. But so why don't you give us kind of the basic intro on what you were trying to do with this. It was a series of four posts, I believe. So this intro post and three other posts. And I thought it was – I just found myself nodding my head in agreement with you as I read through the post. And then as I read through this subsequent post, which we'll get into. But why don't you give us an introduction into this brand taxonomy series that you did on the blog?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' So there's a lot of posts online about favorite brands and these are the brands I like or these are the brands I don't like. But there wasn't a lot that really talked about which brands were, I guess, really making an effort to provide value for customers in terms of putting out new products which are creative in some way or they've got something interesting and unique about them while trying to drive the price down. Some companies are really good at this. Some companies, which are fairly respected in the pen market, are not so good. So I ranked Noodlers and Twisby as the two companies which are really innovative. They're really creative in what they do and in terms of trying to provide a really good product at a lower price than what currently exists. If you look at Twisby's, I think they're priced in the US about $50, $65 for their models. I think they could easily charge $100 and a lot of people would still buy them but they have sort of embarked on a strategy where they're trying to provide it at a lower cost. Obviously, that's a business decision. They're hoping to sell more that way and they're doing that by trying to provide a better deal for buyers really. And then you've got brands which are way less competitive. So brands like Parker and Waterman, they make decent product but they're not particularly creative. They're not doing anything special or innovative or new. Most of their products are just cartridge converter pens, often steel nib pens even in the $100, $150 price range. And for any buyer in the market, particularly anyone who's new to the market, they're probably going to have heard of those brands and maybe feel a bit safer about buying the brands that they know about. Whereas there's a lot of brands where you might not have heard of them or they might not be as well known but they're certainly providing a much better value product. I was just going to say, so I tried to map out all the brands that I was familiar with into how competitive they were and I sort of broke that down into four categories from I guess most competitive to least competitive.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. So two things. One, you talk constantly about the value proposition which is big in everything I try to relate to my readers because they want to know how does pin A compare to pin B in every aspect including cost and what am I going to get the most bang for my buck for. And then you took that kind of as an overall topic and then you broke down into – like you said, the three lists are disruptive which you have Noodlers and Twisby. Then you have an innovative which is – you listed Edison, Nakaya, and Visconti. And then you had competitive which is a lot of the mainline brands that we all know and love, Kaweco, Franklin Kristoff, Faber-Castell, Lamy, Pelican, just kind of right in that area. Then you have the uncompetitive brands which you just talked about. I want to talk – I want to pick out a couple of these in each of these sections and talk about them a little more. Number one, the disruption of Noodlers. Why do you think they are – they fit in that disruptive category? Because if I'm putting together this list in my head, I don't think I would have put them there. I don't know that I would have listed them period quite honestly. So I want to get your take on what you see from them.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' I think it's mostly – and remember I put this list together around the time that the Nuponset was coming out. So I was thinking a lot about them and how this was going to change the market. It hasn't really had the effect I guess I was expecting it to. But I guess they're the only manufacturer of pens nowadays who is doing serious things with trying to come up with a FlexNib pen. And I'm not convinced that the product quality is there. There's certainly a lot of stories about pens straight out of the box that won't write or won't work even with significant work done to them. But you're talking about a piston filler pen for I think they're $20 or something. Yeah, with a FlexNib. Yeah. And I think for a lot of people paying $20 even if they're not 100% sure that it works, that's still good value. And I like the creativity. I like the fact that they're willing to try and do something like that. I am actually looking at redoing the list. I think later this month there will be six months since I published that. So I was going to try and revamp it every six months or so. And I'm not sure if I would keep Noodlers at the top of that list purely looking at the pens. If we're talking about inks, I certainly think that as a brand overall they are innovative. They are very creative.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's a completely separate discussion which we will shoot for getting into that this episode. But that's a completely separate discussion. We're just talking from a pen perspective in this discussion. Yeah.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah. And you're right. From a pen perspective they're probably – well, they're certainly not on the same tier as Twisby or certainly not anymore I don't think. But they are creative. I do like that they've tried to do something.

'''Myke Hurley:''' One of my problems with Noodlers and I think one of the things that holds them back is I perceive that they have a pretty bad branding problem.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' I've done some posts on that too.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. It's – I guess we can get into this a little bit now without totally getting off this taxonomy.

'''Myke Hurley:''' We're going to get like two words into this show outline you put together.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I already told Jonathan that he's going to have to come back because there's no way I'm going to be able to cover everything that I want to talk about. So let's touch on Noodlers. Noodlers is a one-man shop, right? I mean it's Nathan Tardif. He does everything. I mean he's formulating the inks. He's not making the pens. I mean he's having someone make the pens for him. But he's the one-man design person behind getting the pen made and then getting them out to distributors and things like that. And he's the one-man person behind the ink. So why don't – Jonathan, why don't you go ahead and –

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Well, I have heard that he actually sets all the nibs himself.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Really?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' I don't know if that's true but I have certainly read that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I wouldn't be surprised but he's such – I don't know Nathan personally. I've never talked to him. But he is – he very much keeps to himself, right? There's not a lot of – for as long as Noodlers has been around, there's not a lot of Nathan Tardif information out there, right? Would you say?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah, he does have some YouTube videos that you can go and watch and they give you a pretty good sense of the guy. But you're right. There's not a great deal of information available publicly at least.