Platinum President numbers

December 16, 2022

It seems that there are some different Platinum President fountain pens, because I see ads with these numbers: 20000, 25000, etc. (i.e. Platinum PRESIDENT PTB-20000P,
Platinum PRESIDENT PTB-25000P)

What's the meaning of these numbers?

Thanks.

December 16, 2022

51 minutes ago, zeroduke said:

What's the meaning of these numbers?

Syntactically, the numeric part of Platinum Pen's model numbers for fountain pens normally corresponds to their retail prices (MSRP, RRP, or by whichever acronym such is usually known in your culture) in the Japanese domestic market, exclusive of tax, in yen. For example, pens with model number PTB-20000P (which, for disambiguation, may be followed by the # symbol as a field separator and then a number designating the colour or colourway; then optionally the - symbol as another field separator and a number designating the nib type or width grade) has a retail price of ¥20,000+tax, with the current domestic consumption tax rate being 10%; so, at full price without discounts, you would expect such a pen to sell for ¥22,000 in a Japanese department store.

However, Platinum Pen has recently announced that it will be raising its retail prices broadly across its product catalogue effective 1 January 2023, and I see it has already updated its website to display the new prices against product listings; so, at this point, the model numbers and the retail prices shown are mismatched. In the past, Platinum changed model numbers when it raised retail prices, even if there were no other changes to the products themselves; for example, the model number of the #3776 Century ‘Black in Black’ went from PNB-13000 to PNB-15000, when the price went up from ¥13,000+tax to ¥15,000+tax. Given how many products are affected in the upcoming round of price increases, I'm not sure if Platinum Pen is going to update all of the model numbers, or just keep them as-is.

The alphabetical code prefixes in the model numbers correspond to some sort of mapping to product families that Platinum Pen employs for internal use. I'm not privy to the exact details of it, and I have not reverse-engineered the logic of the ‘system’. At this point, there are both President and #3776 Century fountain pen models with the PTB prefix in their model numbers; and, looking across the #3776 Century fountain pen models, there are some with the PTB prefix and others with the PNB prefix. (All the ones with PNB prefix are fitted with Slip & Seal, while the ones with PTB prefix aren't, from what I can see.)