Editing The Pen Addict 131/transcript (section)

== Pen Cleaning ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Perfect.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. Oh, I can never remember that. The pen cleaning and maintenance is a video I link to constantly. You know, that's probably the biggest question I get from people just starting with fountain pens. And then the random one is flying with fountain pens. That question comes up so much. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's all the time, you know, flying with fountain pens. Because, you know, once you get into fountain pens, you want to carry them all the time. And they're not airplane friendly. Utensils. But, you know, when someone's going on a trip, you know, like I feel naked if I don't have one of my fountain pens with me when I've traveled across the country. And I was like, so, yeah, between the most basic of cleaning and maintenance to the outlier items such as flying with fountain pens, I think the whole series has been fantastic.

'''Brian Goulet:''' That's great. I'm glad to hear that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. So, do you have a view count on these? Do you have one of these that it's like super people watch more than other besides probably the first one? Yeah.

'''Brian Goulet:''' Yeah. I mean, I've got all my view counts public on YouTube. So, like, it's not a secret or anything. No, no, no. Yeah. I think the, let's see, geez.

'''Myke Hurley:''' The most popular video is the Midori Traveler's Notebook with 72,583 views.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Wow. Out of all the videos. Yep.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And then it goes Namiki Falcon first impression and then pen maintenance and then how fountain pen works. And it starts to get into a bit more. It gets a bit more varied from there.

'''Brian Goulet:''' That Falcon first impression. That's my second most popular video.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, 72,218.

'''Brian Goulet:''' Oh, gosh. Wow. That was like the third pen I'd ever used. That's really crazy. Okay. That's an old video. That's an old video. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And that Midori video, we could stop right now and do a whole other hour just on that stinking notebook. It's so popular and so customizable. We could do a whole hour show. We'll have to think about that one time since that's turned out to be such a popular video.

'''Brian Goulet:''' Definitely. I'd love to talk about that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I want to talk about one little odd specific thing that I find awesome about Goulet pens. And this is kind of, you know, I'm really dropping in a random, random bit here. You take your packaging very seriously.

'''Brian Goulet:''' Mm-hmm.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' When you pack an order. It's like you could have your, you know, an own fan blog of just, you know, Gouletpackaging.com. Because people, like, people post images of, like, how y'all packed the orders, how well it's packed, how intensely it is packed sometimes.

'''Brian Goulet:''' Mm-hmm. It wasn't like I started this business and I was like, I'm going to be known for the way I pack. You know? It was like, honestly, for me, I'm a very hands-on guy. You know, I was building things. I was making pens. So for me, like, you know, packing stuff up, like, that was, you know, second nature to me almost. And in the early days, I didn't know how to ship anything. I was like, well, I'll use USPS because I don't know how to do anything else. You know, I can ship it out of my house. And so I was like, you know, what kind of boxes do they have? And I'd, like, seen commercials for the flat rate shipping. And so I was like, well, gosh, let me see if I do flat rate versus weight based. You know, I'm charging the same thing for shipping. But, you know, I pay less if it's flat rate if it weighs a certain amount. And it's like, well, okay, that's interesting, you know, and having to figure all that stuff out. And then, you know, they have, like, certain box sizes and stuff like that that you had to kind of work with. And so for me, it was just like, okay, let me see if I can pack it safely in the smallest package, least most economical as possible. Then I can charge less for shipping and be more competitive and so on and so forth. But, you know, the thing that I always say is, like, you know, we're selling fountain pens, which are, you know, small but relatively expensive items. We're selling paper that can get wet or bent or, you know, scratched or whatever. And we're selling ink, which can break or freeze or whatever, you know. It's like it's kind of like the worst combination of things that you're going to be shipping in one package. So I had to think, like, what's the best way to package all this stuff together, you know. And I hate packing peanuts. Like, I hate them with a passion. Like, I hate getting them. I hate dealing with them. They're terrible for the environment. And, yeah, you can buy eco peanuts and all that. But, like, no, I just – you get crud everywhere when you're dealing with packing peanuts. Like, I'm just not going to do it. So I was like, okay. Not to mention the stuff rattles around. It doesn't even work that great anyway. But so I was like, okay, what do we do? I was like, okay, bubble wrap. I'll do bubble wrap and then that's really safe and I can wrap things up and all that. But then stuff would be, like, shifting around inside the bubble wrap because, you know, you got a pen case that's, like, rectangular. And then an ink bottle is all square. And, you know, who knows? The paper is this long, huge pad and it's, like, the weirdest combination. So it's like Tetris every single order you pack up, you know. So I eventually kind of came on the conclusion that, like, I needed to, like, have everything together in, like, one solid brick, you know. So it's like, what do I do to get a brick? And so this whole idea of, like, the stretch wrap, you know, because you like saran wrap, like, cookies on a plate and stuff like that. And, you know, it kind of keeps things together. So I was like, okay, well, what kind of, like, saran wrap type stuff do they have? And I originally, for, like, the first month was using clear saran wrap. But, you know, that was before the whole blue thing really kind of was as intentional as it was. But it was relatively early on when I started doing the blue thing. So I found that you could buy blue saran wrap to kind of match our blue ink splatter. And I was like, oh, that's just cool. Like, I have to do that, you know. So I started doing the blue saran wrap kind of thing. And then I would, you know, kind of strategically package things together, wrap them all together. You know, I'd wrap it in the wintertime. We wrap an ink bottle kind of separately from everything else. So if it does break for some reason, it's rare that that happens. But if it does, then it's not going to ruin everything in the box, you know. So it's just like this combination of kind of like having that Tetris gene, you know, and also the combination of being really, really empathetic about, you know, the person that's actually receiving the end product, you know. And it's like, yeah, we use a lot of bubble wrap. And I get criticized here and there for how much stretch wrap we use and stuff. It's like, okay, I know. Like, it weighs a little bit on my conscience that I'm not like as eco-friendly as I could possibly be. But at the same time, it's not eco-friendly to have stuff break and get damaged in shipping either. So we kind of weigh it out. But I can say like we have a remarkably low rate of things that get damaged in transit. And to me, that's not just like a statistic. To me, it breaks my heart whenever anything gets damaged or lost or whatever because I know that that person that's affected by that, you know, like you, Myke, it's like you got something sitting in customs. Whoever shipped it, you're just like one of 100 things or 1,000 things or whatever they're shipping that day. And it's just a statistic for them. But like for you, like that's your thing. Like that affects you 100%. So it's the same kind of thing for me. It's like I always view like how is what I'm doing affecting that one person that this order affects 100%. And yeah, no matter how big we get. And like now, like I'm not the only one doing it. Like our packing process is largely untouched from the way I was doing it back in my garage. But like I've kind of retrained that. I'll kind of pass it down, you know, as we've hired more people. And it's become like a way of life around here, you know. And I constantly say like you can look at like these orders that we're printing out and shipping out every day. And you can zone out and you can look at them and be like, yeah, it's just another order, whatever. But like no, every single customer, you know, every single order that comes through has a person's name on it. And I was like that person is affected 100% by what you're doing. So that's like really instilled into what we do around here. So even though we're getting bigger, even though, you know, you could say like we're not the same mom and pop we used to be. Like, yeah, it's true. We're not in our garage anymore and that kind of stuff. But even still, like everything that we've tried to do as we've grown has been to try to scale the unscalable, which is to have that personal touch for everybody and to hire people and train them and grow them in our company that care as much as Rachel and I did in those early days.