[penrivers]

I dont see any declining, once a friend of mine who was top executive here in Chrysler de México, told me that the Americans were no more interested in manufacturing, you know, cars, cameras, pens etc, that the priority for them was informatic, softwares and avionics, that it was the core of power. I dont know. Maybe. Greetings from México.

[RLTodd]

penrivers, on 08 October 2009 - 05:54 PM, said:

I dont see any declining, once a friend of mine who was top executive here in Chrysler de México, told me that the Americans were no more interested in manufacturing, you know, cars, cameras, pens etc, that the priority for them was informatic, softwares and avionics, that it was the core of power. I dont know. Maybe. Greetings from México.

Yes. That is about right.

The great delusion went something like that. It was the evolution of the great "Knowledge Economy." When it was described as "clean and green" people should have seen the red flag. There is the other little thing about the arrogance of Americans thinking that they were smarter than certain other peoples and would be able to dominate, accrue wealth, and export from a "knowledge based economy."

[gross]

heineda, on 08 October 2009 - 02:10 PM, said:

This response is not related to fountain pens, but to the point of manufacture. We do not make anything in the USA anymore. I have a friend that recently closed his mens clothing store, in part because he was comitted to selling clothing that was made in America. As of now, there is no clothing made in America. None. I think this is the problem with our economy and should be our presidents primary concern - not health care. We import all of our steel from China. If we went to war tomorrow with China we could not build a single weapon to fight with. America needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, including pen manufacturing.

Dan

I think Dan hit the nail on the head. Others have made similar statements. Would the production of an American fountain pen equiped with a piston filler have prevented what has happened to American pen manufacturers? No, because what happened here is exactly as Dan has stated it - it isn't about fountain pens at all.

[Johnny Appleseed]

mstone, on 08 October 2009 - 02:33 PM, said:

I think you're missing the obvious. Parker and Sheaffer died because they were too big to survive given the size of the market they were selling to. Those two companies in the 1950s and 1960s were selling more fountain pens than the rest of the world's manufacturers combined. They had manufacturing in several countries and on multiple continents, they had sales, service, bureaucracy, pensions, etc., all sized for that volume. Then people stopped buying fountain pens. At that point the manufacturing facilities, sales structure, service department, bureaucracy, pensions, etc., all became liabilities. Montblanc was a little tiny company which could reinvent itself because it was small enough to do so.

The comments about the growth cycle of many different companies is well taken, but I think there is a major misunderstanding about companies like Parker and Sheaffer. When fountain pen use started to decline they did not sit back and shrink and say "I wonder what happened." They pumped out ballpoints by the gazillion, just like Bic. The Parker Jotter came out in 1955 and was a huge success. Sheaffer was a big player in ballpoints, felt-tips etc. They changed to adapt to market conditions.

The changes in ownership that occured with the companies was reflective of the changes happening to large corporations and the US businesses in general. As the founding family became less involved in the actual operation of the corporations, they sold their controlling interests and the companies were aquired by large multi-national holding companies. Multinationals changed the product lines to position them within the companies overall strategic goals (eg, Parker as a mid-line pen brand, Waterman as the top-line) Manufacturing turned to overseas sourcing, as it has for much of American industry. Manufacturing in Europe has, under different legal structures, currency, and economic environment, held on longer against the lure of cheap labor in China.

The companies that could not adapt to the shift away from fountain pens are no longer alive. Montblanc was unique, and ahead of it's time, in marketing fountain pens as a luxory item and focusing on a specific target audience, while Parker and Sheaffer also had large markets for other writing instruments to keep up.

What differentiated Montblanc, and some of the other companies listed above, is that they only sold to a high-end market. When Montblanc became a luxory pen brand, they stopped producing student-grade pens. While a $300 Sheaffer might be just as good as a $300 Montblanc, you can also get a cheap Sheaffer, but you can't get a cheap Montblanc.

Quote

Johnny Appleseed, on 08 October 2009 - 07:14 PM, said:

Quote

Another point to consider - Parker is the #2 status pen brand, behind Montblanc, in much of the world (and the 2nd most often pirated).

That sound new to me honestly. In Europe I would put Parker behind the four producers I mentioned. Parker is more identified with Jotter and Reflex than the high end market. I'd put even Waterman higher on status. Possibly in USA is different because of the history of the brand, don't know. It seems to me that the recent history of Parker is one of struggles, cutting costs and lay offs. I'd be interested in other opinions too.

I was actually thinking of Asian markets rather than the US. Go to any store in Asia, outside of Japan - the #1 status brand is Montblanc, #2 is Parker. That is one reason why there are so many counterfiet Sonnets out there, but much fewer counterfeit Pelikans (and of course, scads of counterfiet MB).

The layoffs et al of Parker's recent history have more to do with overseas sourcing than with brand status. That said, Newell-Rubbermaid is positioning Parker as a mid-line brand, with Waterman as their top-line, so they have lost ground as a top-line pen.

I think brand status order cited in the original post may be valid for a European market, but I don't think they are true for other markets. In Europe, at least continental Europe, I could see the piston filler having a certian advantage.

I would also like to see sales numbers before we conclude that companies like Pelikan have a stronger position than Parker or Waterman. Outside of pen specialty stores, I don't see a lot of Pelikans et. al. in the US.

John

[Johnny Appleseed]

diplomat, on 08 October 2009 - 01:05 PM, said:

Johnny Appleseed, on 08 October 2009 - 07:14 PM, said:

Let's raise another question - what percentage of Montblanc Pens are piston filler, vs the percentage that are cartridge/converter? For that matter, what percentage of Montblanc pens are fountain pens? And I mean percentage of sales, not models. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they sold more CC 146s than piston-filled 149s, and more ballpoints than either.

It's not a matter of sales, but more a matter of status. MB sells lots of 164 BP because the models like 149 set the status high on the brand. So models like the 149 are more important for MB that for the mere sales numbers, they drive up sales in other lines too. And, again, I am talking about the high end market of fountain pens, identifying this market as the most important market for fountain pens since the 80s.

Again, I doubt that the success of the MB 149 was due to the fact that it was a piston-filler as much as that it was a big Montblanc. It was the advertising and brand creation that made the status. In continential Europe, the piston filler may have been an advantage, but I doubt it had much following outside of Europe prior to Montblanc - Chicken and egg again.

John

[Johnny Appleseed]

RLTodd, on 08 October 2009 - 10:22 PM, said:

penrivers, on 08 October 2009 - 05:54 PM, said:

I dont see any declining, once a friend of mine who was top executive here in Chrysler de México, told me that the Americans were no more interested in manufacturing, you know, cars, cameras, pens etc, that the priority for them was informatic, softwares and avionics, that it was the core of power. I dont know. Maybe. Greetings from México.

Yes. That is about right.

The great delusion went something like that. It was the evolution of the great "Knowledge Economy." When it was described as "clean and green" people should have seen the red flag. There is the other little thing about the arrogance of Americans thinking that they were smarter than certain other peoples and would be able to dominate, accrue wealth, and export from a "knowledge based economy."

I am not so sure it was such a great delusion. A similar change occured with the industrial revolution - raw materials aquisition was exported overseas to the colonies, where it could be found and aquired much cheaper, while the high-tech manufacturing remained in Europe, and the US. We can see how well that worked. A similar process has been at work more recently - export of more labor-intensive manufacturing jobs, while more high-tech faculties (the above mentioned avionics, informatics, etc.) remain here (the world may use computer chips made in Malaysia, but they run them with Microsoft software and the factory runs it's production line with Oracle). Whether the technological edge can continue to keep the US ahead is the question.

John

[LouisA]

Quote

Overlooking the piston filler mechanism in both the 50s (when the FP decline started due to the introduction of the ball point) and the 80s (when the FP market started to change again towards this "luxury" niche) contributed to the decline of the USA fountain pen industry.

The one great fallacy of this statement is that you are assuming or implying that people would purchase a fountain pen instead of a ball point or computer simply because it has a piston filler mechanism. Let me ask you one thing. If you have a Montblanc and someone notices it, someone who may not know much at all about fountain pens, do you think they know it is a piston fill and do they care? Your statement is that people would have bought more USA made pens for the simple reason the pen had a piston fill cannot be supported through any facts or documentation.

[mstone]

Johnny Appleseed, on 09 October 2009 - 01:24 PM, said:

mstone, on 08 October 2009 - 02:33 PM, said:

I think you're missing the obvious. Parker and Sheaffer died because they were too big to survive given the size of the market they were selling to. Those two companies in the 1950s and 1960s were selling more fountain pens than the rest of the world's manufacturers combined. They had manufacturing in several countries and on multiple continents, they had sales, service, bureaucracy, pensions, etc., all sized for that volume. Then people stopped buying fountain pens. At that point the manufacturing facilities, sales structure, service department, bureaucracy, pensions, etc., all became liabilities. Montblanc was a little tiny company which could reinvent itself because it was small enough to do so.

The comments about the growth cycle of many different companies is well taken, but I think there is a major misunderstanding about companies like Parker and Sheaffer. When fountain pen use started to decline they did not sit back and shrink and say "I wonder what happened." They pumped out ballpoints by the gazillion, just like Bic. The Parker Jotter came out in 1955 and was a huge success. Sheaffer was a big player in ballpoints, felt-tips etc. They changed to adapt to market conditions.

I didn't say they didn't try to adapt. I was responding to the question, which was, essentially, "why didn't they turn into boutique luxury pen companies". Yes, they tried to continue with ballpoints, but selling a lineup of ballpoints doesn't require anything like the same kind of organization that selling a lineup of fountains requires. It's not just a question of what you're selling, it's a question of how you're selling it.

Quote

What differentiated Montblanc, and some of the other companies listed above, is that they only sold to a high-end market. When Montblanc became a luxory pen brand, they stopped producing student-grade pens.

And this is exactly what the big companies could not do. The margins are a lot higher in the luxury pen market, but the revenues aren't high enough to support companies the size of the old parker or sheaffer. In order for them to make the change they would have had to jettison a lot of staff and manufacturing capacity thirty years ago (while they were still making money), and that probably still wouldn't have worked as they would have thus created a lot of ill will among a lot of the same customers they'd still have been trying to sell to.

Quote

The layoffs et al of Parker's recent history have more to do with overseas sourcing than with brand status.

Labor costs in germany and italy aren't particularly low. In this much, at least, I think the difference is the "luxury brand" margins that MB can command. I think that if Parker/Sheaffer could have focused on the $500+ pen market they could have easily afforded to keep the US production facilities with their high labor costs, etc. But, as I outlined above, I don't see how they could have managed to do that in practice.

[diplomat]

Johnny Appleseed, on 09 October 2009 - 07:24 PM, said:

What differentiated Montblanc, and some of the other companies listed above, is that they only sold to a high-end market. When Montblanc became a luxory pen brand, they stopped producing student-grade pens.

I don't think that's true. And the two statements above elide each other. MB was an all round producer and reacted to the 60/70 crisis by evolving in what is now. And even more striking is Pelikan. Pelikan still is an all round producer, The Pelikano Jr. is the high end of the school Pelikan range. They have out 2€ pens branded Pelikan!
More than this, in the 70s Pelikan was in the same condition as the USA counterparts. They removed the "adult" lines (400NN and P1 were discontinued in 1965) and focused on Pelikano and other young "trendy" products. When they decided to re-enter the adult market they did it by launching a new brand, it was Signum by Pelikan, where "Pelikan" was small and on bottom far right of the big Signum logo. How they did resurrect? Well, in 1982 they bet all what they had on the re-edition of the old 400 line... piston filler should I add that :)
I think the Pelikan history pretty much highlights the mistakes done by Parker and Sheaffer.

Johnny Appleseed, on 09 October 2009 - 07:24 PM, said:

I was actually thinking of Asian markets rather than the US.

Ok, I can't comment on this. The only thing I know, by "reading" Shumi No Bongubaku is that in their first 10 issues they alternate in cover MB, Pelikans and Italian pens.

LouisA, on 09 October 2009 - 08:13 PM, said:

Quote

Overlooking the piston filler mechanism in both the 50s (when the FP decline started due to the introduction of the ball point) and the 80s (when the FP market started to change again towards this "luxury" niche) contributed to the decline of the USA fountain pen industry.

The one great fallacy of this statement is that you are assuming or implying that people would purchase a fountain pen instead of a ball point or computer simply because it has a piston filler mechanism.

I'm not saying that. I only noted that the more successful high end brands have a Piston filler mechanism in their flagship models.

LouisA, on 09 October 2009 - 08:13 PM, said:

Your statement is that people would have bought more USA made pens for the simple reason the pen had a piston fill cannot be supported through any facts or documentation.

So true. But how many statements in this forum are based on facts and documentation? The above sentence can be used to end whatever thread you want, I guess.
I've put the matter on the table because I was thinking about it (and - btw - I still believe it's true) and wanted to hear other members point of views.
It's still called discussion forum right? Thanks.

[eric47]

Johnny Appleseed, on 09 October 2009 - 07:44 PM, said:

A similar process has been at work more recently - export of more labor-intensive manufacturing jobs, while more high-tech faculties (the above mentioned avionics, informatics, etc.) remain here (the world may use computer chips made in Malaysia, but they run them with Microsoft software and the factory runs it's production line with Oracle). Whether the technological edge can continue to keep the US ahead is the question.

And a fair amount of development and support for Oracle is in...India. :) And from what I understand, they're not alone.

[welch]

I tend to agree with Gyasko. The problem for American fountain pen companies came from the base: it washed away in the '60s when American schools accepted ballpoint pens and later when schools dropped cursive writing classes.

I learned to print, using a pencil, in the mid-50s. By 4th grade we were practicising cursiove writing, and our teachers demanded that we use fountain pens. It seems always to have been that way: my kindergarten desk -- brand new in 1953 -- had a plastic ink-well. If anything, the Sheaffer cartridge student pen, that old clear-plastic scratchy pen, was a technological improvement over stick pens. You could still buy stick pens at my local drugstore in the late '50s -- along with Shaeffer and Parker ink.

From the 3rd or 4th grade onward, we had "letter" charts above the blackboard. I remember being taught proper cursive strokes, designed to keep the pen on the paper as long as possible, and, I think, designed to minimize the upstroke.

My kids, now in their late '20s, never studied or practiced or drilled at cursive writing. They were encourage to use word-procesors, just as my generation useed typewriters in high-school.

I work in a company headquartered in Belgium; some of my colleagues in the New York office are Belgians who were always required to used fountain pens (on "french-ruled" paper).

Pelikan's annual report notes the solid foundation the company has in the German school system. American companies had that -- note the Parker 45 -- but the schools changed.

I see no reason to believe that piston filling would have saved Parker. Instead, I think Parker's strength in ballpoint pens kept the company going long after its rivals. Consider: who buys a Pelikan ballpoint -- which uses the Parker-format refill, incidentally.

Parker might have lasted longer if they had slid into the computer - printer - ink - paper business, but ver pen or pencil companies did that. Most typewriter companies died: where is Royal? Olliveti shed several groups of people who designed and built check-scanning hardware -- in fact, when I worked on a check imaging system, it seemed that most of the check readers were made by one group or another of ex-Olliveti employees. IBM shifted out of the typewriter business. HP survived because they came in with lazer-jet printers.

Piston-filling fountain pens? I can't claim to know what appeals to the luxury market in anything, but I'm not convinced that any one filling mechanism would have won Parker/Sheafer/Esterbrook/Eversharp permanent success.

(Of course, I still think American kids should be taught cursive writing, along with sentence diagramming for grammar...but that's another matter.)

[saintsimon]

The impression that piston filling is something elitist and high-end or expensive to manufacture is not really sustainable: look at all those cheap German piston fillers of the 50s and 60s by Pelikan, Soennecken, Reform, Geha and all those others, or at the post-war Italian piston fillers like the 88 family. Or the cheap Reforms of late, the mid priced Pelikans and the Cleo Scribent chiffre 05. These could be made economically in large numbers.

These German made cheap piston fillers (twist button under the blind caps) sold under the Le Tigre brand by Conway Stewart are really not suitable as status symbols (though the nibs are quite good):
http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/4159/2tigres2is9.jpg

This post has been edited by saintsimon: 11 October 2009 - 11:44 PM

[LouisA]

diplomat, on 09 October 2009 - 03:21 PM, said:

I've put the matter on the table because I was thinking about it (and - btw - I still believe it's true) and wanted to hear other members point of views.
It's still called discussion forum right? Thanks.

Yes it is called discussion. However the notion that pen companies failed in the US simply because they lacked piston fills or put another way, the tide of Bic sticks and Apple computers could have been turned if darn it Parker and Cross had stuck a piston fill on their pens is just well, ridiculous. I guess you could also put up for discussion that there is a 50-50 chance that the Sun will NOT raise in the East tomorrow morning. I mean either it will or it won't so that's 50-50.

[randyholhut]

I would agree that a lack of piston filling pens in the Parker and Sheaffer lineups were not a reason for the two companies' demise.

When you think of the post-WWII innovations of the two companies in just the area of filling pens, the arguments don't hold up.

Sheaffer's Touchdown fillers were in production from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. The Snorkel was complex, but a logical evolution.

And how good were the aerometric filling systems on the Parkers? Many "51's" using this system — designed to last 25 years — are still working with the original parts 60 years later.

And the capillary filler on the 61 was a great idea that got killed too soon. It was the easiest, most innovative filling system ever (and it was a shame it was mated to a pen that had durability issues with its plastic).

Lack of innovation didn't kill Sheaffer and Parker. It was the ballpoint pen that did them in (among other things).

[Bill Smith]

heineda, on 08 October 2009 - 08:10 PM, said:

This response is not related to fountain pens, but to the point of manufacture. We do not make anything in the USA anymore. I have a friend that recently closed his mens clothing store, in part because he was comitted to selling clothing that was made in America. As of now, there is no clothing made in America. None. I think this is the problem with our economy and should be our presidents primary concern - not health care. We import all of our steel from China. If we went to war tomorrow with China we could not build a single weapon to fight with. America needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, including pen manufacturing.

Dan

Dan,

The ugly truth is and it's quite simple, the US lost the economic war a long time ago. China does not even have to fire a shot, all they have to do is stop underwriting American debt by declining to buy any more US T Bills.