Editing The Pen Addict 166/transcript (section)

== Innovative Brands ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So let's hold the ink talk on that because we're going to touch on that separately from that. I want to get into these innovative brands because that's where I feel like I live. Like I get – you listed the three, Edison, Nakaya, Visconti. And I get a lot of enjoyment from my Edisons, my Nakaya's, and my Visconti's, although I only have one like really big Visconti.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You're a Visconti guy, right? You have – Yeah, I've got – You're a fan of that brand?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah, they were my favorite brand. I'm sort of moving a bit more towards Mont Blanc now but I love the Visconti's. They are great pens. They have an awesome design team.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So what separates these three brands from this – outside of this competitive realm of brands, which is a more standard traditional – although I guess Visconti is a pretty traditional brand. What makes these innovative as opposed to the competitive of your Pilots, Pelicans, Platinum, Sailors, Deltas, things like that?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah, I think the –

'''Brad Dowdy:''' What sets them apart?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' For Edison, what sets them apart is really the filling systems. As far as I know, they're the only brand where they have really a range of filling systems that you can choose from that goes beyond just cartridge converter or a piston filler. They've got the bulb filler. They've got the pump. They've got a few others.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Personally, I just like pistons. I'm happy with those. But the fact that they're offering those and that – it's Brian, isn't it? Brian Gray. Yes, Brian Gray.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Brian Edison as I call him every single time.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' There are too many Bryans in this community, by the way. There are a lot. But yeah, what Brian Gray has done with sort of – because he's gone back to the original patents for different brands and looked at the filling systems and he's found ways to innovate on those, to improve them a little bit and then to make them something that he can consistently provide to include in his pens. And that's really creative. That's not something that really anybody else in the market is working on. And I love the fact that there's somebody working on saying, okay, this is unique. This is interesting. I think people are going to like this. I want to do it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. And Visconti steps out in a different way from Edison, but they step out with their filling systems a little bit too with the different chambers and the different filling systems to kind of seal off the ink from different sections of the pen, at least in the pens, the Viscontis that I use.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah, no, I've got an Opera Master, which is like that. And honestly, I find it more of a pain than anything else. It does kind of become that way. Yeah. But, I mean, for me, looking at the Viscontis, it's more about the design and the fact that, and the materials. So, if you look at the Homo Sapiens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Materials and design.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah. Except those clips. The Homo Sapiens, I think, is one of the most loved pens, I guess, on the internet, or one of the most lusted after pens. Yeah. In terms of it's got this sort of rubber, lava barrel that people just get really excited about. And when you hold it in a hand, it is phenomenally different to any other pen that's available, at least in my experience. Which Visconti was that?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I missed the brand name. The Homo Sapiens.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' The Visconti Homo Sapiens. And they've just brought out a new one, which, honestly, I'm not too excited about, but it's made out of marble. It's called the Visconti Millionaire. They're not cheap. I think they're, I saw it listed as 1,800 euros. Wow. But who else is using marble in a fountain pen?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. That would be interesting to see. I haven't laid my eyes on that one yet. But the Homo Sapiens has always been intriguing for me just because of the material and no one else really doing that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That style of pen, it just looks fantastic.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Then you get into these competitive brands. And this is where the bulk of the companies land. And, you know, I think that's a completely, you know, valid way to put it. These are the brands that we probably talk about the most, that are the most well-known. But in some cases, it's because they're so large that they don't have the pure innovation of someone like an Edison who, you know, Brian's making the pens himself. Or they're smaller and they're still trying to get their footing into a wider range of pens like, say, a Franklin Kristoff, right? You know, I could see them breaking through into, like, some innovative type stuff. Yeah, I agree. So give me your feel as just this competitive group of companies as a whole and how you see this playing out in the future. Like, if you were getting ready to rewrite this, what do you see moving in or out of this group?

'''Jonathon Deans:''' One of the big surprises for me, because I have started working on this post, is Cross, who I have not previously had really any time for at all. I had, you know, I didn't really respect their product that much at all. But they've brought out these pens recently with Sailor nibs. They seem to be making a real effort. I'm liking some of the designs. I can see them having a fair bit of appeal. And that to me says that they're thinking seriously about this market. They're thinking seriously about how are we actually going to compete in this market? We want a business that's going to stay around and be successful. And I think Sailor nibs, you know, that's a really good choice. Those nibs are beloved. And I think that just the fact that they're willing to make that sort of investment in the market tells me that, you know, they're probably in the uncompetitive brands at the moment. I'd say they're almost certainly moving up to the competitive brands. And depending on what else is in the pipeline, they might even be moving up further.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I thought that was really interesting when that came out. Because I agree with you completely where I just – dismiss is a little bit too strong of a word. But there's no need to look at what Cross was offering because I have this whole list of other pens that I just know is going to be better. Yeah, yeah. But then Cross says, well, we're going to redesign this pen and we're going to use these Sailor nibs in a different way. And I'm like, that's kind of interesting. So it's going to be interesting to see what comes out of that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So nothing's out. That's not out yet, right? I'm struggling to find anything about it online.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It should be out.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' I think the Townsend. I've seen a few links.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Okay.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Okay. But I think – I mean my feeling with Cross and a little bit Parker and Waterman as well, they're not pens for fountain pen people. They're pens for people who give them as graduation gifts basically. They're pens for people who aren't going to write with them themselves. And so quality of the experience isn't paramount. What's more important is it's presented nicely in a nice box and it appears to be a thoughtful, valuable gift. But if you put Sailor nib on something, that's for someone who wants a good writing experience.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. I think what's consistent in the uncompetitive brand and the uncompetitive group here, which you have Aurora, Conklin, Cross, Diplomat, Estabrook, Monteverdi, Parker, Schaefer, Waterman, that's essentially all the same pen. And it's going to look nice and you're going to give it to someone and think you've bought them a really nice pen, like you said, as a gift. And it's just from a fountain pen connoisseur or fan or regular user of pens, they're going to go, eh, you know, I can get a pilot for something, you know, for cheaper and it's going to write better. And, you know, it's going to do, you know, it's going to fit my style better than just – it's almost like that whole uncompetitive group is one big generic pen. It's the same across the board. Yeah, exactly. All right. So I'm going to – I think, you know, there's a lot to read and a lot to gleam from this taxonomy, these taxonomy posts. So I think, you know, people, you know, when you're done with listening to this episode, hit these links. Go read up, read through all these posts and, you know, kind of see what Jonathan's doing here. And I think there's a lot to learn from that. Now, I want to get into one specific brand and we alluded to this before. Aside from your taxonomy series, you do a brand analysis series where you take one brand and you kind of break it down. Yeah. And, you know, in all kinds of different ways. So the one I wanted to talk about the most is Twisby only because there is – especially on Reddit, there's a huge – you either love the brand or you hate the brand and there's no middle ground. So why don't you talk – go through your brand analysis of Twisby, what you like that they're doing, what you dislike that they're doing, what problems are the problems worth the effort for purchasing these pins. So give us a little bit of your brand analysis on Twisby.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah. Well, I'll just say my background with Twisby, I've owned a few. I have had some problems, but they haven't been major problems. But as an economist looking at the market rather than just thinking about the writing experience of the pens or the quality of them, I think they're a great brand in that they've sort of come out of nowhere. They've got a product which is hugely successful regardless of whether you love it or you hate it. You have to admit that they're a big part of the market now. And I particularly like that because they're bringing in a lot of people who probably aren't traditional fountain pen people who – I think fountain pens, particularly in the 80s and 90s, were sort of seen as something for posh people. It was something – if you're wealthy, you wrote with a fountain pen. The rest of us use ballpoints. And I think that Twisby have really been successful in trying to bring in people who want something that's just a nice, pleasant rider, that's not too expensive and is a bit of fun. It's also good for people who like to tinker to pull it apart and to fiddle and to swap out nibs and that sort of thing. And they've sort of occupied this position in the market where they dominate in terms of people who have – particularly those who have maybe come in and have bought a pilot metro or a Lamy Safari. Maybe they've got some sort of entry-level shagfer or parker or something like that as well. But they want something a bit different. They want maybe a demonstrator so they can see the ink sloshing around. They want the capacity for piston filler. They want something where they can easily buy other nibs and swap them in and out. And Twisby offered that and they offered it at a really good price. So the analysis is sort of coming from there. But then looking at, well, with this new product that has recently come out, the Twisby Eco, what effect is that going to have on the rest of the business? Because the Eco is a $30 piston filling demonstrator. It's squarely aimed at people who are brand new to fountain pens and don't necessarily have any experience with other pens. So they want just a basic entry-level pen. At the moment, most people are buying a pilot metro, they're buying a Lamy Safari, and those are the best value in, say, the under $30. I think the Safari is around $30. It might be a little bit more than that. You can get them for a little cheaper in the U.S. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, those are your entry-level pens. And now Twisby are targeting that. I think they're targeting Lamy in particular. And they're trying to replace Lamy as one of the default choices for new users. So what this post was looking at was sort of saying, well, let's play this out. Let's play out this competition and see sort of what happens. And I guess one of the concepts I was trying to get through, maybe not as successfully as I hoped, was the idea of a dominant strategy, which is a concept where your strategy will be successful no matter what your competitors do. And I think I was trying to outline how Twisby sort of has the makings of a dominant strategy with regards to Lamy. There's not a lot that Lamy can do to fight off this sort of the entry of this product. If they drop price – so just to compare the two pens, the Lamy Safari, it's got swappable nibs, nibs which are actually swappable with almost all of the other Lamy pens. But other than that, it's pretty basic. It's a plastic pen. It's not a demonstrator. You've got to buy the converter separately from most retailers.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' And you're talking about around $30 there. So the Eco is priced a few dollars cheaper than that. I think it's $29 in the US. It's a much bigger capacity. It's a demonstrator, so it's see-through, which is pretty cool. And I think that if anybody – well, for the most part, somebody comparing the two would see the Eco as being much better value, even if it was at the same price. The other entry-level pen, the Metro, I think that's quite different to what Lamy and Pilot have got. There's no swappable nibs, but the nib is much finer. The nib is a much higher quality nib, though, on the Pilots. It's a cartridge converter pen as well. I don't think that Eco is going to take away many of the people who are going for something, which is a really fine-tip sort of Japanese pen. But I think – or what I was arguing in the post was that Lamy might have a bit of a problem on my hands because I think they pick up a lot of buyers who – they'll buy the Safari. And then partly because of the swappable nibs, they'll sort of end up buying a Vista, which is their demonstrator version of the Safari, or a Studio, which is the metal-bodied one. I think it's around $60 to $80. Right. People who buy the Safari tend to – oftentimes, they'll keep buying a few extra Lamy's because they can swap over the nibs and there's sort of some benefits there. And I think as far as Lamy's fountain pen business goes, they haven't had a lot of innovation in a long time. They introduce – they have limited editions which are different colors for the Safari and the Studio. They have some special inks that come out. But by and large, they're not doing anything that creative or new. I think the Lamy 2000 is a great pen, but that was released in 1966, and it hasn't changed that much since then. Right. Probably because it's a great product. But I don't know if they have the chops to really do much in the way of innovation. And when you've got a competitor that's really coming at you, you've got to be innovative to sort of protect your business. And I don't know if Lamy have those skills in-house necessarily.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's what I was kind of alluding to earlier with the bigger, well-established companies. What are they going to do to disrupt this? And how are they going to – in Lamy's particular case, how are they going to fend off someone like Twisby who is – Lamy used to own the $30 to $50 market, right? And it's – they probably still do at the moment, but it's not as much of a lock as it used to be with Twisby coming in there. But there's no one else in that market either. There's really not anything like from about $35 to almost $100. That's a huge gaping chasm there of value proposition, if you will. And Twisby owns it right now. And it would be interesting to see Lamy come up with a new design. They tweak – like you said, they tweak everything in their lineup. It seems like once a year, once every two or three years with a new color. But they're not coming out with that $40 pen that's different from the Safari AL Star and then getting on up into the little more expensive studio. They're just putting a new coat of paint on it, and at some point, I have enough coats of paint in my arsenal where I need something else. I need the new Twisby that's going to give me a piston filler and is going to be really interesting looking and things like that. So it's a huge untapped market. Twisby clearly did this on purpose to target that price point because there's nothing else there, and they completely own it and dominate it right now.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah. And I think Twisby's strategy is to be the default choice for anybody who wants to buy a pen from $30 up to maybe $80. And there's not a lot below $30 that I think people are happy even coming into the market. $30 is not a particularly high barrier to entry there.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right, right. And I'm interested to see how the Eco does. I don't have one yet. I'm interested in it. I'm interested to see how it does in comparison with the Safari. The Twisby's everyone's best second fountain pen just because people – like a lot of times, people are hesitant to just spend $60 if they don't have any fountain pen experience. And they have to buy a bottle of ink, and oh, it's going to get messy. And there's all these things for that very first-time buyer. So I'm interested to see how the Eco does, if it can fend off any of that commentary from first-time fountain pen users. But as far as like, okay, I bought my pilot Metropolitan. I think fountain pens are going to be a thing for me. Let me look at these Twisby 580s or whatever. And it's a really great – it ends up being a really good value and a really good writing experience.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' Yeah, and I think they do a great job of bringing people into the community and growing the community, which is just a wonderful thing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And so we don't totally gloss over it. Twisby has a lot of mechanical failures they have worked on over the years to fix. They – the past models, the 540, when it first came out, it had a huge number of failures in different parts of the system, mostly around the section cracking and things in the front end of the pen. They modified that into the 580. Fewer problems, people still have problems.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And then they have the aluminum 580, which is a little bit more substantial. So I don't want to gloss over the fact that a lot of people have a lot of problems with Twisby from a durability standpoint. I personally haven't run across any problems except with my micarta. I had a feed issue. And anyone who's ever dealt with the problems knows that Twisby is super responsive. It's just that some people don't want to deal with the problems to begin with. They've paid their money. They feel like it should be good to go for a few years or whatever. And they don't want to have to go back and forth with emails with Twisby and getting new parts and things like that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I've been at kind of all sides of this scenario. And I've had Twisby replace parts for me. But my point is now, considering the amount of failures that I've had. I mean, I've probably, between me and Idina, maybe we've owned like maybe seven or eight Twisby products. And I think four or five of them have had an issue with some description. At that point, I'm like, okay, the customer service can be really great. But I don't want to have to keep going through this. Like buying a pen, which isn't, which, you know, they're not crazy amounts of money, as you said. But they're not, you know, they're not nothing. They're kind of, I guess, mid-range, right? If you're looking at the $50, $60, $70 stuff. And yeah, they'll fix it and they'll do it really quick. And they do quick shipping on their replacement parts, all that kind of stuff. I mean, they even got me a replacement part for a pen they don't even make anymore. Which was really great of them when it was that one time. But then, you know, Idina had three of these break. And she's not doing anything crazy with them.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's, you know, it kind of gets to the point where it's like, I don't want to have to keep going through this every single time.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, the fourth time, you're over it, right? And it's a valid complaint with Twisby. And if you go on Reddit, you will see some knockdown drag outs in the fountain pens, you know, board on Reddit about this very, very topic. And, you know, you can't discount that that's happening with this brand.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' It's worth pointing out, though, that this is something they're aware of. And part of the reason why the Eco took, like, I think it was announced two years ago that it was soon to go on sale. And I think the reason why it's taken so long is because they really want to get the quality right. Because I think they realize that the quality is what's going to determine if they're successful with this or not. If the pens are great and they're not prone to any sort of issues, they'll sell, like, hotcakes. They'll become the default choice. If they're sort of like a noodler's pen where the quality is a major concern, not a lot of people are going to buy them. And I think that's part of why they've redesigned the section. So it's all one piece now. You can't – apparently that's designed to make it stronger. So they've obviously taken that on board and they're taking that seriously. And hopefully these sorts of issues will be a thing of the past.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because I have to say, like, I was tempted to buy two Twisby products today. New stuff, stuff that I've heard. You know, I'm interested in the Eco. I've read a great review about the Precision. And I was, like, I changed my mind because I thought they're probably just going to break again.

'''Jonathon Deans:''' And this is their big problem.