Or, at the very least, pen designers should at least seek a little inspiration from their daily dental hygiene routine. I actually considered writing a letter to the folks at PaperMate, Sharpie, Pilot, Pentel, Bic, and Stanford, begging them to take notice!
But nobody's listened to me.
Perhaps YOU haven't noticed, but toothbrushes have been looking FANTASTIC for the last 10-15 years. The colors, contours, and swirly designs of the merging of rubber and plastic (a marriage of both beauty and function) have made my jaw drop open...for more reasons than just cleaning my teeth.
My dear reader, let me assure you that the toothbrush industry is alive and thriving. New designs are hitting the shelves on a monthly basis. The choice and selection of toothbrushes are always fresh, always new.
Yes, toothbrush makers have performed leaps and bounds ahead of their design school colleagues who went into making pens. The pen industry has, on the other hand, moved like a slug.
But 5 years ago, something good happened.
A big, multi-billion dollar sector affected the pen industry. Who knew that those in the pharmaceutical field had such ingenious ideas about pen design and marketing! But indeed they did. They brought fresh perspective and new ideas to how a writing utensil could look. Their creations captivated our eyes, jumped into our hands, and found themselves in our conference rooms (and on my e-Bay watch list). As a result, those pharmaceutical products found themselves in our medicine cabinets -- the precise goal of the designers.
But since the fading of this wave of new pen inspiration, the pen industry has gone back to its ways of old, for the most part.
While it is true that they learned from the trends begun by Apple's iPods that COLOR is ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING (and that people will pay more for a plastic tube made of a fun color), they haven't done else with physical design -- until now.
This Summer, some revolutionaries at a pen design company in France called Maped, released the TwinTip pen for the 2010-2011 school year. And its design inspiration comes from none other than the Reach toothbrush. Or, at least, that is my highly educated, please-let-it-be-true hypothesis.
I bought the pen with glee, then raced home to compare it to my Reach toothbrush. Sure enough, they were a complimentary match.
This is a very exciting time to be alive!
