Editing The Pen Addict 229/transcript (section)

== Store Products ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' I want to talk about like some specifics about the store. I want to talk about some specific products and product lines that you guys carry and some really interesting things that you guys are doing online and, you know, at the shows and and things like that. But first, we got one more sponsor to talk about today. And that's our good friends at Harry's.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Harry's is sponsoring this week's episode of the pen addict to let you know about their amazing shave plans and the fact that you can now get yourself a free trial set. When you sign up for a Harry's shave plan, Harry's is so confident in the quality of the products that they make to help you shave better that they're offering them to you for free. Harry's free trial set comes with a razor, five blade cartridge and shaving gel. When you sign up for a Harry's shave plan, all you need to do is pay three dollars for shipping. Brad, why should people use Harry's?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's the best shaving experience on the market bar none. And I've used a lot. I've been, you know, beholden to the the grocery store razor under lock and key for years and years and years. And paying through the nose for those products that are not good, not as good as a product you can get for much cheaper that does a much better job without the stigma of fighting through the lock and key at the grocery store. It's just that good of a shave. It's that good of a product. I've never used anything better. And that's the truth.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Talking about that price. Harry's customers, everyday shavers of Harry's, save about one hundred and fifty dollars each year on blades because they use Harry's. Harry's offer a high quality shave at half the price of the big brand blades. So Harry's razors, their five blade razors include a softer flex hinge for a more comfortable glide, a trimmer blade for hard to reach places, a lubricating strip. And it comes on a textured razor handle for control, even when your hands are wet. Harry's believes so much in the quality of their razors that they guarantee that quality. You'll get a full refund if you're not happy. Go to Harry's dot com right now and you want to use the code pen addict to check out to claim your free trial set. Because you're a listener of this show, as well as that free trial set, you'll also get a bonus post shave balm added to your order on top of all of that. All you need to do is pay for the shipping. That's H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com. Code pen addict to get your free trial set and free post shave balm. Thank you so much to Harry's for the continued support of this show and Relay FM.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So Brian and Lisa, you've introduced this thing on your website in the past few months that I find to be invaluable for me personally. Invaluable as someone who's in the community and needs to answer questions. And invaluable just for the amount of fun I have with it. And that's the ink comparison tool that you built on Anderson pens. And it's really fascinating to play with. And I can't even imagine what went into building that and making it work as well as it does. So why don't you tell me how impossible that was to put together? Because I'm guessing it was.

'''Brian Anderson:''' It took over a year to do everything that we wanted to do. We knew that we wanted to do. We wanted to bring back some things that some of the pioneers in the industry had done.

'''Brian Anderson:''' And we knew that in order to do an ink comparison tool, we had to completely redo the ink swabs that we had at the time, which were a horizontal layout. And that wasn't going to work to compare the color the way we wanted. So we had to completely redo all of our ink swabs. And we are up to over close to 900 inks. And we did five of each. One for the photographer. You know, the three different books that we have. And then one as a backup. And I did all of them. We got a hundred.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's 4,500. See, I can do some math, right?

'''Brian Anderson:''' Well, we started with a broad nib. And we ended up, after about 100 colors, deciding that maybe we should use a medium nib. So we had to start over. But we were very intentional with all of our choices. If we are going to take on this massive undertaking, everyone in the company had input. Which cardstock we changed to, which font we now used, the format. You know, what do we include? What do we not include? And it was very much a collaborative effort with everyone in the company and a couple of friends who gave us some good feedback.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, and the results show. Because you have to have that consistency across the swabs. Because you're pulling them up. You're pulling up basically images of each of these swabs as people go through. Choose a shade. Choose a brand. Choose however they want to put these things together. And then they come up side by side. And if you don't have that consistency across every number that you have, it kind of like sticks out a little bit. But so to like see that and pull that off, I know that took a massive, massive amount of work. So because you're not busy at all anyway. Like as I've proven throughout this show, you guys aren't doing anything. So that probably took you like a day.

'''Brian Anderson:''' Well, you know, we're actually still working on it. We're right now on our third version of the tool. And there are some things that we did that I'm not happy with. So we're actually redoing. We're tweaking some of the swabs that didn't come out quite right. We found a better way to do it.

'''Brian Anderson:''' But, you know, now we have, we took input from anybody who was willing to offer. And we came up with some really great ideas. You know, right now we have drag and drop. So if you want to, you know, pick two colors and you want to move next to each other, you can just click on it and drag it and move it over. And, you know, we came up with some really, really good ideas. I think we've got a solid tool right now.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I didn't think of this until you just said it. It's really, really difficult to capture ink colors accurately in a digital manner. I mean, and you don't have to give me any secret sauce or anything. But what they look like to your eyes in person in a bottle going down on a swab, it's hard sometimes, especially with some inks, to capture that correctly. And, I mean, is that a challenge you ran up against?

'''Brian Anderson:''' Yeah, it was. And, you know, people are very critical of that and rightly so.

'''Brian Anderson:''' I think maybe one of the biggest problems is not only getting the color right on our end, but most people don't understand or they're not aware of having their monitor calibrated. Sure. We calibrate ours every 30 days so that when we're doing images of swabs, they're as accurate as they possibly can be. So sometimes, while it looks right on our machine, it might be a little bit off maybe on yours. And so it's definitely a challenge to try to get it as close as possible so you know what you're looking at.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, like this stuff is so incredibly difficult anyway. I mean, like I've been in person and bought ink and I've looked at it on the swabs in front of me and it ends up being different on the notepad that I use, right? Like it's not even just about the way that the images come out. This stuff just varies so, can vary so much, right? Depending on the tools that you're using even to use the ink.

'''Brian Anderson:''' That's true. Not everybody realizes that. One of the other things we wanted to do was include inks that have been discontinued. You know, everybody's looking for a replacement for Parker Penman Sapphire or, you know, Sailor Apricot when it was discontinued or some of the Mont Blanc limited edition inks. You know, you missed out and now you need a replacement. There was no way to find something close to that without finding a bottle at a show and paying a fortune for it or begging a swab from somebody. And now you can do that. And we added the properties to the inks as well because, you know, people are always looking for a fast dry ink or a bulletproof ink or something that's lubricated or whatever.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I think that's big for like we refer to things like the Parker Penman Sapphire and there's just no way to get it unless they're going to break into your house and go under your bed. Right. So that's the only stash left. I told you not to mention the bed. That's the only stash left in the country. But it's it's cool that, you know, when I bring up certain colors, I can put up that sapphire up there. Like if I'm someone's asking me a question, that's what I use it for the most, actually, is like, you know, I'm thinking about this thing. How does it look compared to this thing? And it's cool. I can pull up that sapphire swab on there. And, you know, you just you don't get that anywhere else. I mean, that's that's really cool how you can have these older colors because people are always referring to give me something like this ink that I used to use. That's not made anymore. And you're like, oh, by the way, here's the swab right here and you can put it up right next to these. How cool is that? I love that.

'''Brian Anderson:''' And we have people who send us samples of ink we don't have in the tool that they would like to see included. And it's you know, we're so grateful that people are so generous. You know, it's it's win win. We get to add something else to the tool to give back to the community. And customers have other inks that they can use for comparison.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I think it's fantastic. And it's it's one of my favorite things online. And I always share it and use the heck out of it. So that's very cool. So you did another thing, I guess, probably within the past year. That's near and dear to my heart. And you not only started carrying sailor, which isn't like the most common thing to have in the US. You have like the high end sailor bespoke lineup, which is really, really difficult to get all these special nibs and, you know, different styles. So why don't you talk a little bit just about how sailor came in, how that ramped up to the bespoke lineup to that you have today?