Need your help, Australian members

[Mech-for-i]

Ok my fellow Australian members , here's the situation , my brother reside over at Australia and my nephew just get into university last semester but due to the quarantine situation he can only now start to goto class in person. He's into industrial design and 3D animation.

 

So this uncle here was thinking to gift him a set of quality drafting pencils as celebration 

 

My question thus : which of these company are best represented in Australia , like servicing , parts etc ..

 

• Mitsubishi Uni
• Pentel
• Platinum
• Zebra
• Ohto
• Staedtler

 

Or is it other Mfr regarding. I was thinking Faber and Rotring but really today they just no longer provide full set of them

 

Thanks in advance

[A Smug Dill]

28 minutes ago, Mech-for-i said:

which of these company are best represented in Australia , like servicing , parts etc

 

There might be a relative ‘best’ out of a bunch of mediocre, poor, and/or non-existent, but I'm pessimistic about your being able to get any good local support from official distributors or regional offices for those brands here in Australia, sorry.

 

The consumer law here is that, if there is a problem with a product, the Australian retailer from whom you bought it has all the responsibility for satisfying the legislated ‘consumer guarantees’; but it says nothing about after-sales service, out-of-warranty repairs, or obtaining spare parts as a retail consumer for whatever reason one may want them.

 

Your best bet is simply to look for the brand that offers the ‘best’ terms of manufacturer's warranty applicable in Australia, then order from an Australian retailer and have it delivered domestically to your nephew. (Best to order it in his name, too, and not in yours, since you won't be in a position to deal with the retailer locally if anything goes wrong, say nine months or two years down the track.) Should there be a problem, your nephew can then make the retailer deal with it, although the customer's recourse is effectively capped at getting a replacement item or a refund of the purchase price, since foreseeable consequential damages are unlikely. Minimising the inconvenience and downtime to the customer, or generally good customer service ‘whatever it takes’ to make things right when something goes wrong, is not part of the retail culture here, in my experience over the past three decades; and things only got worse since the pandemic.

 

(There's a concept here of statutory warranty that goes beyond the terms of manufacturer's warranty, but pursuing it can be difficult.)

 

[Mech-for-i]

16 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

There might be a relative ‘best’ out of a bunch of mediocre, poor, and/or non-existent, but I'm pessimistic about your being able to get any good local support from official distributors or regional offices for those brands here in Australia, sorry.

 

...

 

 

well well, thanks for the heads up , will be doing my homework , really such weird consumer law, seems like its make for 1820's instead of 2020's , considering I might just buy a set here and send it over , if anything , I had past experience with all the brand mentioned and most cannot do proper local servicing anyway in many locale, either one had to wait forever to get replacement parts or options being sending the particular pens/pencils back to the factory. That is one reason I no longer recommend Rotring / Faber , Last I did had to service one , they need to be send back to Germany ( the dealer's word ) I was in Korea then & the time estimated for a repair and then return is 9 months and I was like " well I might just as well buy a new one "

 

Well Grandma ( my mom ) might be visiting the kid come fall so I suppose I still got plenty of time to do my research .. again thanks for the input

[AmandaW]

My recent experience with Faber Castell in Australia is that they don't reply to their Customer Contact email. I wouldn't recommend them.