Editing The Pen Addict 434/transcript (section)

== Pro Gear Review ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, you know, but anyway, I think it's a great pen.

'''Myke Hurley:''' $312 for a Pro Gear is good value in the sense that Pro Gears are the best, right? In my opinion. Yeah. But my thing is that where I would be, it just makes me stop and think about it rather than where I would, if this was $250, I would have bought it already.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. But over $300, I'm now thinking about it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, it's the same reason why I didn't buy Ink of the Witch. Like, I have no interest in buying this, but I think it's a great looking pen, right? Yeah. I just don't need that many $300 Sailors that I'm not going to use. Like, I'm good. I'm good on Sailors for a while. So, speaking of Sailors, Myke, I might not be good on Sailors for that long because our good friends at Bung Box have opened an English storefront online.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's an actual international storefront that you can go to and buy Bung Box products. This is such a big deal. You can buy pens, limited edition pens, and their inks directly in English in local currencies. You can change the currencies on the site. This is so fantastic. I am so pleased that they have done this because we've mentioned it before. It has always been possible to buy Bung Box products from anywhere around the world, but the way in which you did it was daunting and confusing sometimes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's a popular email topic in my inbox. I want this pen. How do I get it? I'm like, well, you can email them and cross your fingers, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And they get it. They're a small shop, but they do customs as well as anyone, and they want other people to have them worldwide, right? They're not shy about keeping them in-house, if you will. They want to share their work with the world.

'''Myke Hurley:''' There's no problem from their perspective, right? They have never put up a barrier for me to buy their products, but just the way in which you did it was difficult. Maybe you don't want to deal with things by receiving PayPal invoices, right? Right, right. Which is the way that they would do stuff. And it works great for me. It doesn't bother me at all, but I can understand why people wouldn't like it. But now they have some of their limited edition pens. There's some great stuff on there. I cannot believe they still have the Hello San Francisco in stock.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Jump on that pen. It is a fantastic colorway for a Progress Lim. It's one of my favorites. I call it the Spider-Man pen. Because it looks like Spider-Man. But yeah. So there's some good stuff there. And I'm also like, I don't have any Mung Box inks. So I'm going to look at that at some point.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, they're some of my favorite. Yeah. They're absolutely some of my favorite. You have Ebisu Gold. I will say you do have that one.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I do. Yes, you're right. I have Ebisu Gold. Thank you.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. But this is cool. I like that they're doing this and putting forth this effort. That's kind of a big deal, I think, for a Japanese storefront to make this decision. Because they're not even close to the biggest player in their local world. But to us, like hardcore pen addicts, like Bung Box is like the Pinnacle. You know, they may not be, you know, the Nagasawas or the Kobes or, you know, the Morizans and things like that. But, yeah, it's pretty cool. So it'll be interesting to see how this goes. So there you go.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I'm going to be intrigued to see how or if they split the really cool stuff across these two storefronts. So, like, when we get the next Sweet Love, right, Sweet Love 2021 or whatever, or Pink Love, whatever it will be, will it be available on this website at the same time, if at all?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Do you remember, like, this is how long they've been thinking about selling to international customers. At one point, before even, like, sending the PayPal invoices, they would put the item up on an Amazon storefront in the U.S. and tell you when it was there so you could go through that process just so they could get you the pen.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Do you remember that? Yeah, I remember that. Super weird.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's how long they've been trying to, like, accommodate their international customers, which I think is pretty cool.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But I'm just wondering, like, will, like, the hot ticket items find their way to the store? I assume so, but we don't know that yet. Yeah. And also how they handled that because my expectation was, B, that they will have two different order systems because this is not the same website platform I don't think that they use for their Japanese website because it looks and acts very differently.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So we'll see how it goes. There's not a lot of inventory on there because, like, they're putting through all their limited stuff. This is not the bung box. If you were going to their store, storefront, this is the limited edition storefront, essentially.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Which is most of what you would want to buy.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yep. All right. Last news topic. I got an email this morning from my new best friend, Myke, at Uniball US. So since we had our Pilot G2 discussion and I made a couple of Instagram posts, you know, just saying, like, what other gel pens that I like. I've had Pintel reach out and now I've had Uniball reach out through Instagram. And I was like, hey, look, you know, I'd love to talk to you. I'll shoot me an email. So I got an email this morning right before the show.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And, you know, just their marketing department just reaching out to say, oh, I spent some time on your site. I love, you know, well, I'll go through what they said because I thought it was interesting. But then they dropped in, did you know that we are going to be a standalone US company starting on January the 1st and we'll be out from under Newell as the, you know, the conglomerate Newell that owns or manages or distributes Sharpie, Rotring, Paper Mate, Waterman. You know, all those brands. Parker is another one of those brands. And I was like, no, I had no idea that Uniball is going to separate out from there. So now I'm intrigued, right? Because they have always been, they have historically been hard to talk to. Like I can get in touch with someone at Pilot in the US because they have their own US distributor. They're Pilot USA. So now they're going to have a Uniball US, I don't know what you call it, affiliate distributor. That's not going to be under the umbrella of a different conglomerate where they're just, you know, a small fish in a big pond. Now they're going to be their own fish in their own pond. So I'm interested. They're interested in sending me some products. They got some new things they were working on. They appreciated my love for the DX. And they're like, oh, I see you made a pin for that. I'm like, yes, I did. So it was pretty cool. I just found the conversation interesting because that wasn't on my radar at all. So they already have a new site up. It looks like it's separated out. And I look forward to seeing how they participate in the community. Because Pilot, on the fountain pen side, they were great. I haven't talked to their new rep yet. Their longtime rep, John Lane, is with a different company now. So I haven't talked to their new rep. But traditionally, if I needed something from Pilot, I could email them and get an answer. But generally, we would see Pilot putting their dollars in Hollywood, right? Pilot was on the red carpet. They'd have all these red carpet events and swag bags things. And all of those types of things, which is cool. That's their job. So maybe Uniball has seen that and they want to get a piece of that. But I like that Uniball has at least reached out to me and said, hey, we like what you're doing. And can we talk about some new products that we're going to release soon? And, oh, by the way, we're going to be out on our own now here in the U.S. market, which I'm obviously a super fan of that. And I look forward to working with them.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Not really sure that I'm following what makes this different, but I'm excited that you're happy about it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Access.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Okay.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's completely different from me, from my perspective. Right. To have access.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So this is better for people like yourself. And if it affects the customer, it doesn't really make a difference.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now if I have a question, I can get somebody. Okay. If I want to try a new product.

'''Myke Hurley:''' To them because they're a smaller company now.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. Because I can be more direct instead of having to go through the Newell maze of trying to figure out who is responsible for Uniball. Right. Are they going to do a thing?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because if you were able to find the person who ran Uniball or whatever, it would be useful. But trying to get to that person when you're going through this massive monolith of a company is almost impossible.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right, right. So anyway, and it's more just, okay, I'm interested because Uniball is probably second behind Pilot in like the standard pin market in my, I think it's probably Pilot, Uniball, Pentel. Although Pentel internationally might be bigger than Uniball. It probably is actually. But anyway, to have their own offices in the US, I'm curious why and why now. So I find these things interesting. The other thing I find interesting is I think I'm going to have to change how I type Uniball out. I think they're going with the lowercase u. I think they are.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And that's going to be a problem for me for a long time.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because their website, when I added it to the show notes, we have a thing that extracts what the website title is. Mm-hmm. And that defaults to all lowercase.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. And it's in their copy as well, which is new to me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I mean, that's how the logo looks. So they're representing the logo in text.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Mm-hmm. But they do things like they call some things Uni and then they call some things Uni Ball. Like there's some things have just the Uni name.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Maybe the ball will be in all caps just for fun. Mm-hmm. Uni Ball.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So like it's Uni Super Ink and Uni Ball for the pens, even though like the Uni Ball Air is not a ballpoint pen. So should that one be the Uni Air cushion tip?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I'm lost, man. You're going to have to draw me a map to get me out of that one, I'm afraid.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Exactly. Exactly. So these are the things I deal with when I have to write the word Uni Ball. So when I'm talking about products. All right. Beautiful. Wonderful. Wonderful. Awesome stuff.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Amazing. If you want to find show notes for this week's episode, you want to go to relay.fm slash penaddict slash 434. You do want to go to the show notes for this one. I think there's a lot of stuff that you want to have looked at. Hopefully this is not the first time you thought of this because the episode is now over. If you want to find Brad online, you can go to penaddict.com, knock.co. Congratulations on the funding of the Kickstarter campaign. Brad Dowdy. Boop, boop.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Putting in the purchase order. It should be Friday. I should put in the purchase order. So there's Kickstarter real quick has a new status board feature on there. So you don't have to send out an update every time you do something and just want to communicate something small with your backers. It's like a status board on the front page. I can say, hey, sent the invoice today. And like that be the update. And so it doesn't get lost in the comments page, nor do I have to send out an entire update for, you know, a small update. I look forward to testing that out. I don't see that on yours right now.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But I guess I will.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm guessing because I can see it on the back end, but I haven't put anything in it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'll keep my eye on that. Let me know when you do that, actually, because just me. I just want to see what it looks like.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I need someone to test it, right? Or, you know, I can log into a different browser or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Intriguing. Interesting. You can also go to spugdesign.com. Brad is penaddict on Instagram. Dowdy is on Twitter. Tuesdays, Thursdays, 10 a.m. Eastern time. Twitch.tv slash penaddict. I'm going to watch Brad's stream. I did a stream yesterday as we were recording this where I built my very first keyboard from scratch, including all the soldering. Go to mike.live and you can still see the video on demand there for the next couple of weeks if you want to watch it. I was very pleased with how it came out. So I'm going to be doing more and more of that. I'm still in a beta period while I'm working out my schedule and stuff. But soon I will be also reporting my own streaming schedule when I talk about Brad's. So I am iMike. I-M-Y-K-E on Twitter and Instagram. Thanks to Squarespace and Green Chef for their support of this show. But most of all, thank you for listening. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Brad. Goodbye, Brad. Goodbye, Brad.

[[Category:Podcast Transcripts]]
[[Category:The Pen Addict Podcast Transcript]]