Editing The Pen Addict 73/transcript (section)

== Montegrappa Pens ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. Yep. So, I found some new stuff this week that I thought you might like, Myke. Cool. One of the things, I just happened to see it, Gold Spot pens, they carry a lot of different fountain pen lines that I'm not normally familiar with. And I either caught it on their blog or email or something like that that for a pen brand called Montegrappa, an Italian pen brand. And they do, they make some, I've never used one. They make some regular edition pens. All their pens are really good looking. And then they do some special edition pens based on people or time of year or whatever. And I got an email or I saw it on the blog post. They're doing this Montegrappa skull pen for Halloween. And I just thought that looks super cool. I think I tweeted out about it. It's about a $300 pen, but it's all black. It's got skulls all over it. The cap might be a little much for me. I don't know if I'll get it, but I thought it was really neat looking.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And so I was checking this out and I was talking about it. And then someone tweeted me, was like, well, have you seen the Montegrappa Batman limited edition? And I was like, oh, mercy. I was like, now I remember when that came out. It was probably last year or something. And I'd totally forgotten about it. And I was like, I got to show this to Myke. So have you looked at this Batman pen? I'm looking at it right now. It is nuts. Don't look at the price. I just did. So the skull pen that I was looking at that I thought was pretty cool. I don't know if I'll order that or not. It's borderline. The cap might be a little much to me. The cap's got a single gigantic skull. And the skull looks like he's got like a little shiny rhinestone tooth or something like that. That might be a little much. I like the barrel with all the mini skulls wrapped around. This Batman pen is stunning. Every bit of it. But the difference between the skull pen and the Batman pen is about $2,800. The Batman pen retails for like $3,300.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, no. So it's about $3,000 difference. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But if you pay $5,695, you can get a watch and cufflinks too.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Ooh. Now that's got you written all over it. Yep. So we'll have all this in the show notes. You have to check out this Batman pen. It's actually quite impressive. I don't think it's tacky or gaudy or something like that. I mean it's obviously monstrously expensive and I would never even consider. But I'm enjoying looking at it and I love the design of it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I think it looks awesome.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. And like the bats that they have all of the bat symbols that they have all over the barrel, they like they fill in. It's not like consistent around the barrel. Like the back of them, there's just a few and it kind of grows into a bunch around the front side of the barrel. And it's got a really interesting clip on it. I don't know if that's a Batarang clip.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It kind of looks like it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But they've done their best. Like, you know.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So I wanted to put this in there for people who haven't seen it. Go check out this link in the show notes. You will. I was impressed. So hopefully you will be too. It's pretty stunning. And I remember when that came out and I just I think I just blew it off. And because it was so expensive. I don't even remember looking at it. But now that I look at it, I'm pretty impressed by it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I wish I had that sort of money laying around. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' See, I don't know that I would even spend it then. I mean, if you spent that kind of money on a pen, would you use it?

'''Myke Hurley:''' If I could spend that sort of money on a pen, then it wouldn't make a difference. Because it would be like buying a $200 pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I guess so. That's true. Like if it was now, like me or you buying this pen, like spending all this money on the pen, I don't know that I could use it. But I guess if you're in the world where you're spending that much on a pen, I guess it would probably be a good point.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But if I was to buy it now, you know, like with the money that I have, I would like just only ever use it at home. And I would empty it all the, you know, I'd empty the ink every time.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You know, I would use it very, very rarely.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right, right, right. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I don't even know that I'd ink it up. I don't know. I'd be hard pressed. So anyway, so that's not the only interesting pen I found this week. Have you seen, did you get as many tweets and emails as I got about the polar pen on Kickstarter?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I got a few people contact me just to say, you know, look how expensive this thing is, look how well it's doing, that sort of thing. I got an email actually about it. Yeah, I got an email too. I think it's the most successful pen Kickstarter of all time now.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, suck it, Visionaire. Yeah. That lasted all of about a week. This is gone berserk. It's at 421,000. It's in Canadian dollars, but that's practically a one-to-one exchange rate with U.S. dollars. So it's right around that same. And that's only in 10 days. I think this was a 30-day. Oh, no, it's been more. It started on September 10th. So it's been a 45-day.

'''Myke Hurley:''' No, it's 36 days is their funding period.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay. So it's been alive for about 15 days, and it's already at $421,000. 7,318 backers. I'm shocked at the quantity of backers that they have and how many they've sold. It's pretty stunning. It's a really unique concept. What it is, it's basically a pin that's built off of a magnet set. Is that the best way to put it?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's hard to explain without going to look at it, but it's basically like the magnets build the barrel of the pin, and you're able to use it as a stylus. You're able to use different pin refills in it based on the amount of magnets you buy. I hope I'm doing this justice. I haven't totally done all my research on it. Just looking at it for me personally, I have zero interest in this pin, but it looks pretty cool. I'm not going to back this pin. I just don't think I would ever use it. What do you think, Myke? Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It also looks cool. I'm watching the video now, and he's doing a bunch of fun things and cool things with it, but I'm like, this is not at all what I want or need in a pen. Right. Okay. Oh, great. Look, you just made a circle out of it. I mean, okay. That's fine. This is an interesting project, but there's nothing about this. Nothing about this is the reason that I buy pens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. That's why I'm shocked at the money so far. It's pretty crazy.

'''Myke Hurley:''' If you think about it, that makes sense because all of the reasons that we buy pens are not any of the reasons that regular people buy pens. Yeah, I guess that's true. If it makes nearly half a million dollars, it will make over half a million dollars. It could make a million dollars. Mm-hmm.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's what you would want. You would want something that is so out of the ordinary.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't think this could work like this. I can't imagine it working very well. I'm looking at it, right, and these are tiny modular magnets. What happens if you grip the pen too hard? Do they all dislodge? Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Do they adjust side to side as you're writing? Is that what you mean?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I would feel like it would be moving around. Mm-hmm. Like the barrel would be contorting as I'm writing. Not a lot because obviously the pen refill runs through the middle of it, but I just can't imagine it working. I don't know. I mean, I'm watching the video as we speak and it looks like a lot of fun, but that's not what I do here. I actually don't think it looks very good.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Have you ever heard of Buckyballs?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I have some.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So it's very similar to this. That's what it reminds me of. Buckyballs, which are just like the magnet balls. It's like a desk toy where you can just build different shapes with the magnets. And then they ended up getting pulled off the market. But like the U.S. government or whichever, I don't know, whichever business unit monitors this kind of stuff ended up pulling those off the market because they said that they were a danger to children, even though they weren't marketed to children. I mean, I'm totally on Buckyballs' side of this thing. It's kind of ridiculous that they got yanked off the market. But this is the same kind of thing, you know, where those magnets are small enough. And the theory is someone, you know, a kid puts those magnets in his mouth and those magnets stick on the insides of their bodies and do bad things. So that's all I can think about with this thing is that it's very similar to Buckyballs. And, you know, it's probably the same type of market that's buying this pen, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Anyone who bought the Buckyballs would be totally into this. And the Buckyballs blew up. I mean, they sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of those things.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So it's pretty interesting.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And I don't know what happened on this Kickstarter page, but it's already lost like $25,000 while I'm looking at it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I was just about to say that to you.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It went from $421 to $395.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So what has happened there?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I have no clue. It's like it auto-refreshed.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. It just did that for me. Oh, man. That's so annoying. I wish I knew how many backers there were beforehand.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I said it on the thing. So right now there's $7167. So we'll just have to listen back to see what I said previously.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So the listeners know.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So I said how many backers there were just a minute ago.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I was just about to say. I was like, hang on. That's changed. Now I've gone down to $395,000. This is where you find out that I had $20,000 behind this thing. And then you turn me off.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That would be awesome.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's so weird.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So anyway, we'll keep watching this. And I'm interested to see how high it goes. But it's not a pen for me. But all I can say is hopefully all the people buying this pen need a pen case. That's all I can say. Huh.

'''Myke Hurley:''' How close.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' We'll close. We'll talk about that at the end. All right. We'll save that to the end. You will be surprised in a good way.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I just did a search. And you didn't show up.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, please. You would know if it was live. I don't know. Probably because I would be in the hospital with like a heart attack or something from stress.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But yeah, we'll talk about it at the end. And we got a couple other quick topics that I want to get to. And then we'll talk about the Nock launch time. So why don't we get into our last sponsor. And we'll knock out a couple other things. And we'll call it a day.