Meet the Parkers, Part… Actually, Not Parkers (Yet)

Sat­ur­day after­noon I went to the Pen Fair and Sale at Flax Art for one pur­pose: to give the Park­er rep­re­sen­ta­tive a hard time.

I should back up and explain why that was nec­es­sary. The first fact you need to know is that Park­er is owned by San­ford, the com­pa­ny that makes Sharpies. San­ford also owns Park­er com­peti­tors Water­man and Rotring.

Rotring is one of my favorite pen com­pa­nies, for a lot of rea­sons. First, they make an excel­lent Rapi­do­graph, one I respect and admire even though I pre­fer the Koh-I-Noor brand, which once upon a time com­pet­ed with Rotring but is now owned by them.

Rotring makes good foun­tain pens as well. Con­sis­tent with their oth­er engi­neer­ing-ori­ent­ed prod­ucts, Rotring pens have a long his­to­ry of deliv­er­ing a clean, dis­tinct, even line. I’ve often said that if I chose to, I could use my Rotring 700 instead of my #3 Rapi­do­graph. In truth, the line it lays down isn’t quite that con­sis­tent, but I real­ly would­n’t want a foun­tain pen to be. While the 700 will write an even line, it also responds well to vari­a­tions in pres­sure and angle, mak­ing it a real work­horse for draw­ing and writing.

Rotring also makes the Art­Pen, which is one of the most pop­u­lar foun­tain pens in his­to­ry. I’m not a big fan of the Art­Pen, but I’ve used them from time to time. They’re reli­able, but tend to be scratchy and don’t have much weight to them. I was spoiled by using my 700 before I ever touched an Art­Pen, so please for­give them any crit­i­cisms I put down. It looks like they are run­ning around $20-$25 each and for cal­lig­ra­phy they’re prob­a­bly a fair choice for begin­ners. For some­one look­ing for a pen to sketch with, I rec­om­mend a low-end Park­er foun­tain like the Vec­tor or I.M./Profile, or heck, the dis­pos­able Pilot Var­si­ty is a fan­tas­tic pen.

But I digress. The Art­Pen is a very pop­u­lar pen and it’s been around for a long time. Anoth­er pen from Rotring that I’ve damned with faint praise for years is the Rotring 600. The Rotring 600 foun­tain pen is incred­i­bly pop­u­lar for much the same rea­sons that I love the Rotring 700, but the 700 had a high­er stan­dard of pro­duc­tion, was more expen­sive, and was can­celled as soon as San­ford took over Rotring, so very few peo­ple got a chance to com­pare the 700 and the 600. Tremen­dous num­bers of 600 users love their 600 and I prob­a­bly would too if I had­n’t got­ten to the 700 first. My expe­ri­ence with the 600 is that it does­n’t mea­sure up to the 700. It’s a ter­rif­ic pen for draw­ing and writ­ing, but the 700 is better.

This could very eas­i­ly turn into the sto­ry of a great com­pa­ny ruined by being bought by a huge cor­po­rate over­lord, but the his­to­ry since 1998 has­n’t been all bad. The pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty rebound­ed after a dip imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing acqui­si­tion and Rotring has gone on to make some nice writ­ers and gone out on a limb with ground­break­ing (some say ugly, I say they’ve had some win­ners and losers) designs.

Rotring has been doing so well, in fact, that I final­ly decid­ed to buy a 600. The 600 was renamed the Rotring New­ton and sub­se­quent­ly redesigned from the old, angu­lar-and-tubu­lar Bauhaus design to a some­what more dar­ing and con­tem­po­rary design. As I’ve been buy­ing foun­tain pens late­ly I thought it was time to get the 600/Newton. I see that the design is a depar­ture from Rotring’s old per­son­al­i­ty, and maybe that’s a dilu­tion of the brand or maybe just a pro­gres­sion of design. I just think it’s a good-look­ing pen and Rotring makes qual­i­ty writ­ers, so it’s worth try­ing out.

The odd­est thing hap­pened: I was unable to find one. Rotring prod­ucts have been dis­ap­pear­ing from the shelves and pen cas­es of the stores I fre­quent and even the ones I don’t where I went search­ing to find a Newton.

This is sad­ly typ­i­cal of the pen indus­try. Usu­al­ly if I want some­thing I have to spe­cial order it. I like fine nibs, but they’re hard to find; pen stores often can’t car­ry all vari­eties or fin­ish­es or col­ors, so I end up not see­ing the one I want in the case, for any num­ber of rea­sons, I usu­al­ly can’t find what I want in a store.

But this was more. Not only could I not find the mod­el I was look­ing for, I could no longer find any Rotrings at all, except for the Art­Pen, which isn’t usu­al­ly sold in the same sec­tion. Where sev­er­al months ago I could find Rotrings in every art sup­ply and office sup­ply and fine pen store in the City, today I find none.

The good folks behind the coun­ters at sev­er­al of these stores told me that they can­not even get Rotrings any longer. There has­n’t been a Norther Cal­i­for­nia rep­re­sen­ta­tive for Rotring in some time, and Rotring has appa­rant­ly not been fill­ing orders made any­where in the Unit­ed States.

Fol­low-up calls to fine pen stores around the coun­try turned up sim­i­lar answers. Rotring is sim­ply not return­ing phone calls to the Unit­ed States. But the alarm was real­ly sound­ed when it was dis­cov­ered that Rotring no longer appears on sanford.com’s home page or their pull-down nav­i­ga­tion where the user is asked to select from their list of brands. Rotring is men­tioned in their brand list under the «About» sec­tion, but that’s hard­ly a pro­mo­tion of a brand that should be one of their more promi­nent. More dis­turb­ing, the rotring.com URL offered on San­ford’s site redi­rects to a Newell/Rub­ber­maid-brand­ed site with no infor­ma­tion about Rotring. Even on rotring.com’s «key brands» page, the Rotring name and logo are con­spic­u­ous­ly absent.
A rep­re­sen­ta­tive from San­ford’s cor­po­rate offices told Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look that San­ford had no inter­rup­tion of sales nor plans to inter­rupt sales of Rotring pens. The rep­re­sen­ta­tive offered kingpens.com as a source for all mod­els and expressed sur­prise that the New­ton was not avail­able on that site. (As of this writ­ing, kingpens.com’s data­base seems to be mal­func­tion­ing and no pens are avail­able at all.) She then said some­thing about the New­ton being «redesigned», claimed that the New­ton would be avail­able once the redesign was com­plete, but would­n’t pro­vide any oth­er specifics.

In the mean­time, cultpens.com in the UK, whose Rotring cat­a­log explains that Rotring has been strug­gling to repo­si­tion itself in the face of the move of the vast major­i­ty of tech­ni­cal design and draft­ing work to CAD sys­tems and illus­tra­tion soft­ware, tells me they have no trou­ble get­ting deliv­er­ies from Rotring. Strange, then, that from San Fran­cis­co to New York Rotring is blacked out.

It was with these unre­solved ques­tions that I ambushed Pete, the Parker/Waterman rep­re­sen­ta­tive at Flax Art on Sat­ur­day. I’ll make clear here that Pete, despite hav­ing only a few months on the job thus far, han­dled him­self with dig­ni­ty, cour­tesy, pro­fes­sion­al­ism, and good cheer. When I use the word «ambush» my tongue is plant­ed firm­ly in cheek, but I did have some direct ques­tions for Pete, who answered direct­ly, plain­ly, and when he did not know an answer said so straight away.

Rotring’s busi­ness in the Unit­ed States, it seems, is to be absorbed by the Park­er brand. It’s unclear exact­ly how this will shake out, but even a best-case sce­nario does­n’t look good for Rotring. Cer­tain­ly we will nev­er see the engi­neer­ing- and draw­ing-ori­ent­ed foun­tain pens of the last quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry. My guess is that the Rapi­do­graphs and Art­Pens will con­tin­ue to be sold under the Rotring name, but that all Rotring foun­tain pens but the Art­Pen will be dis­con­tin­ued entire­ly. The best-case sce­nario is that Rotring in Ger­many will con­tin­ue to pro­duce foun­tain pens that will be mar­ket­ed in the Unit­ed States as Park­ers and in the rest of the world as Rotring. Per­haps just as Pilot/Namiki sells the Bam­boo under the Nami­ki name in the Unit­ed States and as a Pilot in Europe, we will start to see the Park­er Ini­tial and the Park­er New­ton state­side. That would be hard to get used to, and hard­ly fits the exist­ing Park­er line, but would be a lot bet­ter than hav­ing to ship Rotring foun­tain pens from across the Atlantic or not being able to get them any more at all.

As a post­script to this, I also bent Pete the Parker/Waterman rep’s ear about the dis­ap­pear­ance of Park­er from the rel­a­tive­ly low-end foun­tain pen mar­ket in Amer­i­ca. Pete seemed to pay close atten­tion, asked ques­tions about my sug­ges­tions, and even wrote down a cou­ple of notes. He asked me if I thought there real­ly was a mar­ket demand for Park­er’s $10-$15 foun­tain pens in Amer­i­ca (again, it’s s easy to get them in Europe but they aren’t offered in Amer­i­ca any more). I explained to him my the­o­ry that the high-end pen mar­ket is sup­port­ed by the low-end pen mar­ket. Peo­ple don’t just wake up one day and decide they want a $200 pen. Instead they try out a $10 pen and use it for a cou­ple of years and then move up. Also, peo­ple like me give less expen­sive pens to friends who are curious.

Final­ly, in my eyes the most impor­tant rea­son for main­tain­ing the inex­pen­sive end of one’s prod­uct line. The qual­i­ty of Park­er’s $10-$15 pens — their sev­en dol­lar pens back when I start­ed — builds my con­fi­dence that Park­er can make a great pen for $50, $200, or even $800. Because of the excel­lence of Pilot’s three dol­lar dis­pos­able, I would­n’t bat an eye at spend­ing $400 on a Nami­ki Bam­boo. I know Pilot/Namiki makes an excel­lent pen, peri­od. Sha­ef­fer­’s low-end pens are unre­li­able, leak-prone pieces of garbage. I believe that their high-end pens are of excel­lent qual­i­ty, but deep in my bones I don’t trust it. As a con­se­quence, I’ll nev­er own a Shaeffer.

A com­pa­ny will­ing to pay atten­tion to the small cus­tomer can be trust­ed to take care of the big cus­tomer. While that might sound rad­i­cal in today’s busi­ness envi­ron­ment, foun­tain pens are high-val­ue, high-markup dis­cre­tionary prod­ucts. Trust is intan­gi­ble and easy to neglect; when mar­gins rest on the brand recog­ni­tion, how can a pen­mak­er afford not to invest heav­i­ly in build­ing the cus­tomer’s trust?