Editing The Pen Addict 406/transcript (section)

== Pens and Brands Discussion ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And it's a heck of a good pin.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' As a matter of fact, now I'm going to have to go ink that up, but I will say this. I will say this. I have an orange 74 that I've put in my sale pile, like, you know, like the thinning the hard pile. And it's not because I don't like the pin. It's because I literally never use it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But that would be one of the different ones though.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I know, but it's just I don't reach for it. Right. So these are the conversations I have in my head. I'm not reaching for that pin. And what would make me reach for that new, the new 74? Like what's going to make me go for a 74 over this other than like the gold nib. You always have the gold nib argument. Like you're never going to get better prices for like gold notes. All these pins that I was talking about last week are all steel nib pins, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So yeah, it's a fun conversation. Like, you know, I just I'm so passionate about like all these little things. I like I want to see more from some companies that I know could do it, but I know that they won't because I understand the math behind what I want, what I'm asking. Yeah. You know, pilots essentially a conglomerate, you know, they just don't like that will never move the needle for them in the short term. But I think it would benefit long term, right? If they continued to build on that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because that's like the idea of not missing the trends, right? Like we see this in technology a lot. You know, you look at a company like Microsoft where it's like you're so massive. Was it important for you to pay attention to this these new and up-and-coming ideas? Nah, you're so big. What's the, you know, you're fine. What's the problem? Yeah. And then you lose out on something, right? Right. I mean, I think that's a fair comparison.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what I'm getting at with Pilot. It's like they're just so big. They don't have to care what people think about their offerings in that price range because they're already selling thousands and thousands of those, right? Why should we do something different? But doing something different today might change how things operate 10 years from now. Yeah. And they just don't have to worry about that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Nope. Well, we'll see, right? Yeah. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's a, this is like one of my favorite conversations is like thinking about like the pen brands. Like that's the whole, you know, hire me Lamy thing that I, that I like to do. I don't want Lamy to hire you because they'll take you away from me. I know they will.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's, it's right there, man. Like I couldn't do it with Pilot, but I think Lamy could. Lamy is, I mean, we've seen it. They'll make

'''Myke Hurley:''' these wild boxes for a Chinese mascot from a, like a prefecture. Like, you know, they have it in them.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. They are, they are like five tiny minuscule decisions away from like changing everything that they offer. Yeah. Yeah. But they, it's, that's the thing is like Lamy, you can see it like it's like, oh, they're so close. They're so close. They could just, they just did this one thing. It's so close. But yeah, again, massive, massive company, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Mm-hmm.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Minuscule changes don't, don't necessarily add to the bottom line. And those are the decisions these companies have to make. Yep.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Not us podcasters. Should we wrap up on a last TPA question today? All right, sure. All right, let's do this one from Lisa. In the period of staying at home, are you using up your stashes? Which stashes are you using? I'm assuming this is pen and paper. Well, I think there is a, there is a following question of what is the stationing equivalent of toilet, paper, or pasta? Yes. We accidentally bought a three kilogram bag of pasta. It doesn't sound like an accident to me. No, it really was an accident. So we, you know, like food delivery companies like everywhere, right? Like they've been a little bit trickier. We've ended up getting our system in control, but like we had to order from a different supermarket one week. And I was ordering everything on the phone, like on an app on my iPhone. And I was just like, oh, I'll add this bag of pasta. Right. And it was like three pounds. And I didn't really pay attention. Honestly, like, I don't know how this makes me sound, Brad, but like, I don't know how much a bag of pasta costs.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, you're not blinking at three pounds. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I know, but I don't, I'm not buying a three kilo bag.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Right. But I didn't know I was buying a three kilo bag. I thought I was just buying like a regular bag of pasta.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' For three pounds, I would have just pushed the button too. It's not like it was 12 pounds and you had to think, what am I doing? Exactly.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It was just like, oh, I'm not really paying attention. Like what, you know, it just is what it is. Right. And I was like, I'll buy two of them because we need, we want two bags of pasta. So, you know, it's just like, oh, this is just what we'll get. So I, then the delivery shows up and I'm in my office and Edina's taking in delivery and she's like, what is this? What's going on? And we have these two.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' He's got like a weight belt on, like carrying the groceries.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I guess I'll do the conversion. Three kilograms is 6.6 pounds. Jesus. And you bought two? I bought two of them. Yeah. So, but one of the great things you can do with these is you can send back what you don't want. Right. So we just said to the delivery guy, like we ordered these by accident because we were ordering fast. Right. Cause this is, we're in this like panic moment of like, oh, you know, we're trying to get a delivery order in. Cause this was, this was a couple of weeks ago when, when at least here, it was a little bit more tricky in some areas to get groceries and things have calmed down now in a lot of places to a point, not everywhere, but like, you know, so like there's a little bit more like stability and in the processes cause the delivery companies, the grocery companies, like they had no systems in place to handle this. Right. Right. because this kind of thing had literally never happened before.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Like the scale that we're talking about. So we ended up sending back one and now we have this, we have this huge bag of pasta now. I love it. That's awesome. So, you know, the great thing about it is like, we just now won't order any more pasta and we'll go through it. Right. Like, that's the great thing about pasta. It's just the dry food. We'll keep it in a, in like the cupboard and we'll just get to it as we go. But, but anyway, so that's our biggest stock of anything is our three kilogram bag of pasta.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I love it. So, so per Lisa's question, what's, what's the stationary equivalent of toilet paper or pasta? Like what does she, what does she have here?