Parker in 2024

[Targa]

On 2/14/2024 at 11:46 AM, Beechwood said:

 

 

I may be behind the times but isn't £1250 really too much to pay for a Parker or any other pen with a filling system that was invented by the Neanderthals?

 

Perhaps its just me, I squeak when I walk.

Don't trash Neanderthals.  They were actually far more advanced than popular culture admits.  And there is some Neanderthal in pretty much all of us.  

[Udo]

Parker pens were the most elegant writing instruments I have worked with.

 

I always had a Jotter ballpoint pen and a Vector rollerball in my shirt pocket.

 

A red Parker Duofold Centennial fountain pen (the big red one) from 1990 and a Parker Duofold Centennial red ballpoint pen were on my desk.

 

There was also a Parker 51 fountain pen and 51 pencil from 1953, all in perfect working order. The clip of the Jotter alone, peeking out of my shirt pocket, next to the modern Vector rollerball. It was always a pleasure to use the 45 fountain pens from the 70s, which wrote straight away and wrote beautifully.  Simply perfect quality.

 

How I loved reading: "The Parker Pen Company - , Wisonsin, USA or Newhaven, England". For me, the Mercedes of writing instruments.

 

I revered the company founder George Safford Parker, but even more so Kenneth Parker, who took the brand to its zenith.

 

Plus the perfect customer service from Parker Pen in Germany. There were people there who understood their craft. Replacing a clip on a 45 cap: no problem and free of charge. Replacing the inner workings of the 51 from 1953? Although the fountain pen was sent to Baden-Baden in Germany, it came back from the Newhaven factory - repaired, of course.

 

And now? Lousy quality, no more spare parts for older pens, no proper sources of supply, no more customer service, no contact person.

 

Only accountants and controllers who have no idea how to make fountain pens and have systematically destroyed a major brand name.

I was allowed to visit the factory in Newhaven, UK, back then. Those were the days! I could scream with rage!

Edited April 4 by Udo

[mr T.]

On 4/3/2024 at 8:57 PM, Udo said:

I was allowed to visit the factory in Newhaven, UK, back then. Those were the days! I could scream with rage!

The worst Parker pens I've ever owned (that literally broke into unrepairable pieces) were all made in the UK. So I disagree.

[The Pen Paladin]

I am new here, but not new to fountain pens.  And while I am no expert and have no proof, it seems that there has been a shift to fun, bright, and modern pens; and the companies that make them are doing well.  I am not aware of Parkers financial situation, but I will tell you that I am a die hard Parker fan.  Not just the vintage pens, but also the newer ones.  The fact that Parker can't make up its mind where they want to sell their pens from and how to market them.  You can't buy them from their website, but they guide you to Amazon to purchase them.  That immediately tells me that they aren't concerned as much as they should be about a premium or high-end image.  The product itself though, I find to be quite good.  The cheaper pens (IM and below) seem to dry out faster than others (to include vintage parkers), but I like their nibs quite a bit.

[Heinkle]

4 hours ago, Pens_and_Pucks said:

The fact that Parker can't make up its mind where they want to sell their pens from and how to market them.  You can't buy them from their website, but they guide you to Amazon to purchase them.  That immediately tells me that they aren't concerned as much as they should be about a premium or high-end image.

Completely agree with this sentiment. For example, Amazon only sells the four standard Duofolds (the prices of which fluctuate significantly almost every week), while the special editions are available through a very limited number of retailers, such as Hamilton Pen

Company.

 

The brand new Pioneer Collection Duofold, the supposed big release of 2024, has had almost no publicity and is pretty hard to find. As far as I can see only THREE retailers are stocking it (Cult, Online Pen Company, and Appelboom).

 

Not a single influencer or pen YouTuber has mentioned it or been lent one to review.

I just cannot fathom what the retail strategy is here - selling a £1200 pen to the five people who know of its existence?

[The Pen Paladin]

22 hours ago, Heinkle said:

Completely agree with this sentiment. For example, Amazon only sells the four standard Duofolds (the prices of which fluctuate significantly almost every week), while the special editions are available through a very limited number of retailers, such as Hamilton Pen

Company.

 

The brand new Pioneer Collection Duofold, the supposed big release of 2024, has had almost no publicity and is pretty hard to find. As far as I can see only THREE retailers are stocking it (Cult, Online Pen Company, and Appelboom).

 

Not a single influencer or pen YouTuber has mentioned it or been lent one to review.

I just cannot fathom what the retail strategy is here - selling a £1200 pen to the five people who know of its existence?

Happy to know I’m not the only perplexed one here!  
 

I was able to get my hands on one of the IMs in the new Pioneer Collection and it is outstanding (Atlas Stationers).  The nib is quite stiff, like the other steel nibs they make, but it writes well.  The quality is great, and it is a beautiful pen.  I should have went with the Sonnet to get that gold nib though.  
 

And Amazon’s “Parker” store is priced high, but you can get the same thing for nearly half the price from another Amazon retailer.  

They need a marketing overhaul!

Edited April 10 by Pens_and_Pucks

[Mercian]

22 hours ago, Pens_and_Pucks said:

The fact that Parker can't make up its mind where they want to sell their pens from and how to market them.  You can't buy them from their website, but they guide you to Amazon to purchase them

 

 

18 hours ago, Heinkle said:

I just cannot fathom what the retail strategy is here

You guys’ statements just reinforce my own impression of the un-directed nature of the ‘Parker’ and, increasingly, the ‘Waterman’ divisions of NR 🙁

 

Should anyone be feeling masochistic, they may read (yet again) my Standard Rant on this subject by opening the following ‘Spoiler’ box.

 

Spoiler

It seems to me that, at the least, NR suffers from a bloated surfeit of Executives with no sector-specific experience of the divisions that they are assigned to command. People who are competing with each other across its various divisions.
A caste of highly-remunerated ‘overlords’ who have ‘rightsized’ away far too many of the people who do the actual work.

I suspect that NR has got rid of the experienced Marketing specialists from each of its divisions, and is instead employing just one undersized rightsized team to attempt to ‘market’ all of its products across all the different classes of product that it makes; and therefore that these people get assigned to ‘market’ products in sectors of which they have no understanding.
I can think of no other single ‘explanation’ that could cause what is happening to Parker & Waterman.

 

The phenomenon that I am describing is one that I like to call ‘Large Organisation Syndrome’.
I have experienced its malign effects in Government bodies, and also - with effects/consequences that were at-least as malign - in large private-sector for-Profit companies.

It is caused by having too-many layers of ‘managers’, each of which exists only to ‘report upwards’.
Each member of each layer tends to re-organise any fiefdom over which he is placed - presumably in an attempt to ‘justify’ his existence and his own high remuneration. And each layer tends to rightsize/outsource/sub-contract the ‘functions’ or ‘service-delivery outcomes’ over which it has been given power, presumably in order to create enough ‘headroom’ in the Corporation’s revenue budget to cover their own salaries, benefits, and perquisites.

This ‘charmed circle’ of ‘Executives’ tends to move around between the different divisions within any organisation, and between different organisations (private-public-private-public-private, willy-nilly) often.
Which means that re-organisations, internal/external ‘re-branding’, movement of units between different premises, and re-design of internal bureaucratic/‘reporting’ processes merely for the sake of doing so occur pretty-much constantly.
As does the deliberate discarding of all the staff who have relevant experience of each division, every time that the new ‘Manager’ wants to seek ‘voluntary redundancies’ in order to slim-down his fiefdom’s ‘cost-base’/salary-‘load’.
(This does have the added ‘benefit’ of removing everyone who has been around long enough to be able to prove that the new Manager’s ‘great idea’ will actually damage the organisation.)

The actions of these people therefore do little apart from creating extra bureaucracy (i.e. waste) in any organisation.
Even ‘better’, they do also reduce the organisation’s control over the production of its products/‘delivery’ of its ‘services’, and reduce its ‘agility’/ability to adapt to change.

They tend to destroy any organisation they get a toe-hold in.
 

These layers of ‘value-eaters’ are a blight and a curse on our age. They have been multiplying since at least the middle of the twentieth century.

 

Innit bloody marvellous?

[Azulado]

👋👋👋

Edited April 10 by Azulado

[Azulado]

2 hours ago, Mercian said:

You guys’ statements just reinforce my own impression of the un-directed nature of the ‘Parker’ and, increasingly, the ‘Waterman’ divisions of NR 🙁

 

Should anyone be feeling masochistic, they may read (yet again) my Standard Rant on this subject by opening the following ‘Spoiler’ box.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

It seems to me that, at the least, NR suffers from a bloated surfeit of Executives with no sector-specific experience of the divisions that they are assigned to command. People who are competing with each other across its various divisions.
A caste of highly-remunerated ‘overlords’ who have ‘rightsized’ away far too many of the people who do the actual work.

I suspect that NR has got rid of the experienced Marketing specialists from each of its divisions, and is instead employing just one undersized rightsized team to attempt to ‘market’ all of its products across all the different classes of product that it makes; and therefore that these people get assigned to ‘market’ products in sectors of which they have no understanding.
I can think of no other single ‘explanation’ that could cause what is happening to Parker & Waterman.

 

The phenomenon that I am describing is one that I like to call ‘Large Organisation Syndrome’.
I have experienced its malign effects in Government bodies, and also - with effects/consequences that were at-least as malign - in large private-sector for-Profit companies.

It is caused by having too-many layers of ‘managers’, each of which exists only to ‘report upwards’.
Each member of each layer tends to re-organise any fiefdom over which he is placed - presumably in an attempt to ‘justify’ his existence and his own high remuneration. And each layer tends to rightsize/outsource/sub-contract the ‘functions’ or ‘service-delivery outcomes’ over which it has been given power, presumably in order to create enough ‘headroom’ in the Corporation’s revenue budget to cover their own salaries, benefits, and perquisites.

This ‘charmed circle’ of ‘Executives’ tends to move around between the different divisions within any organisation, and between different organisations (private-public-private-public-private, willy-nilly) often.
Which means that re-organisations, internal/external ‘re-branding’, movement of units between different premises, and re-design of internal bureaucratic/‘reporting’ processes merely for the sake of doing so occur pretty-much constantly.
As does the deliberate discarding of all the staff who have relevant experience of each division, every time that the new ‘Manager’ wants to seek ‘voluntary redundancies’ in order to slim-down his fiefdom’s ‘cost-base’/salary-‘load’.
(This does have the added ‘benefit’ of removing everyone who has been around long enough to be able to prove that the new Manager’s ‘great idea’ will actually damage the organisation.)

The actions of these people therefore do little apart from creating extra bureaucracy (i.e. waste) in any organisation.
Even ‘better’, they do also reduce the organisation’s control over the production of its products/‘delivery’ of its ‘services’, and reduce its ‘agility’/ability to adapt to change.

They tend to destroy any organisation they get a toe-hold in.
 

These layers of ‘value-eaters’ are a blight and a curse on our age. They have been multiplying since at least the middle of the twentieth century.

 

Innit bloody marvellous?

👋👋👋

[Heinkle]

4 hours ago, Mercian said:

 

 

  Hide contents

It seems to me that, at the least, NR suffers from a bloated surfeit of Executives with no sector-specific experience of the divisions that they are assigned to command.

I suspect that NR has got rid of the experienced Marketing specialists from each of its divisions, and is instead employing just one undersized rightsized team to attempt to ‘market’ all of its products across all the different classes of product that it makes; and therefore that these people get assigned to ‘market’ products in sectors of which they have no understanding.

I dread to think how accurate an assessment this is. 
 

Let’s also not forget they show no signs of understanding their audience - they presumably sit around in board meetings pondering the volume of Jotters and Vectors they can palm off to schools and supermarkets. 
 

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Duofold is discontinued altogether before 2030. 

[Glenn-SC]

Does anyone know how many pens does Parker sell per year?  With the plethora of copies available, someone wanting a Duofold is going to be looking for a higher end more expensive pen.  Inexpensive “Duofold style” pens in myriads of colors and trims are readily available.  Parker can probably only compete on exclusivity.  

[Heinkle]

12 hours ago, Glenn-SC said:

Parker can probably only compete on exclusivity.  

 

But I think the point is, are they making a conscious effort to engage the fountain pen aficionados while Jinhao etc offer a visually-similar pen at a fraction of the price? We all know high-end products are about painting a lifestyle (look at car and perfume ads). Is Parker selling me the Duofold dream, or is it quietly going through the motions of releasing a product that it no longer  innovates, just so it can tell the shareholders it's in the same race as Montblanc, Pelikan and Visconti?

 

Speaking of colourful, low-end pens, a cursory glance at the Parker Instagram page will illustrate their direction of travel (in this case, something called a "Tokyo" Jotter):

 

 

I will bite my tongue.

[Glenn-SC]

And what is MB or Pelikan or Visconti doing that is new for the “average” FP buyer?

All I see is high priced Special Editions from MB and Visconti and Special Colors from Pelikan.  

[mr T.]

On 4/11/2024 at 12:53 AM, Glenn-SC said:

Does anyone know how many pens does Parker sell per year?  With the plethora of copies available, someone wanting a Duofold is going to be looking for a higher end more expensive pen.  Inexpensive “Duofold style” pens in myriads of colors and trims are readily available.  Parker can probably only compete on exclusivity.  

Some interesting figures from the early '90s can be found here. The margin on the Parker and Waterman products was around 40% at the time. Not sure if there can be found more recent figures.

[Mercian]

On 4/11/2024 at 3:09 PM, Glenn-SC said:

And what is MB or Pelikan or Visconti doing that is new for the “average” FP buyer?

All I see is high priced Special Editions from MB and Visconti and Special Colors from Pelikan.  

Let’s ignore Mb & Visconti, because (unlike Parker) they only operate in the ‘luxury’ market.

Pelikan, like Parker, offers ‘school pens’, pens for ‘adults’/‘work’ at various price points, and ‘luxury’ pens, so let’s compare it to Parker.

 

Unlike Parker’s Duofold range, Pelikan has maintained pretty much all of its ‘standard’ range of offerings in the various Souverän ranges, and its annual LE versions AREN’T priced at three times as much as the ‘base’ Souverän on which they are based.
The prices of the pens in its different ranges are internally-consistent, and they don’t overlap with each other to anything like the degree that Parker’s do.

And this is in despite of the fact that Pelikan, during its ownership by its previous multinational owner, also shows strong signs of having been infested by transient Executives with no imagination and absolutely no idea of the market for the products that they were overseeing.
E.g. the translucent barrel stripes that have been a USP of Pelikan since at least the 1950s are no longer available, which is a consequence of some ‘genius’ having outsourced production of that material to an external for-Profit monopoly.
Up until the 1990s that material was manufactured in-house by Pelikan.
Now, having lost control of its production, and having lost the sole producer of the material, they are trying to sell their expensive ‘luxury’ pens without a key function (the ability to know how much ink one has left in one’s ‘luxury’ pen) that their competitors do offer. Idiocy.

I hope that Pelikan’s new multinational owners will reverse that mistake. They (Hamelin Brands) are at least a stationery company, so they ought to at least understand the stationery market.

 

But even Pelikan has a much more coherent approach to its product lines and pricing than does Parker under NR, and a much better website.

Just look at the appalling state of NR’s websites for Parker and, increasingly, Waterman!

• They load very slowly, with irrelevant marketing blurb predominating, and they make it very difficult to find basic information about product ranges;
• they don’t even mention their own proprietary converters that they sell for use with their bottled inks;
• in an era in which ink manufacturers are proliferating (which suggests, to me at least, that there is a large number of people out there who actually want to buy ink), they have reduced the number of colours of ink that they offer;
• they don’t sell through their own websites;
• they don’t even link to retailers that sell all their products;
• the websites have a ‘thrown-together’ or ‘half-built’ feel, and contain out-of-date information.

The whole thing is an absolute mess!

 

Lamy’s product ranges and website provides an even-more damning indictment of how badly NR is ‘running’ its stationery divisions.

 

Every aspect of Parker seems completely un-directed; that nobody is at the helm.

Or, rather, that there is a rapid and continuous turnover of ‘bosses’, each of whom cancels his predecessor’s ‘vision’ and orders his underlings to instead implement his own new ‘strategy’. With the result that nothing gets completed, the employees who do all the actual value-add ‘don’t know whether they are coming or going’, and morale - and therefore efficiency/productivity - is low.

How the vorsprung durch technik can a conglomerate as large as, and with as much income as, NR not be capable of building a website as competently as ‘vast business behemoths’ such as Goulet Pens, or Cult Pens, or The Writing Desk?
Why are they not utilising the economies of scale that are available to them to run their stationery arms efficiently and competently?

I’m a ‘fan’ of Parker.
It was the ‘posh’ brand when I was a kid, and I own more Parkers than any other brand of pen.
I find the chaotic incompetence that has been on display from them for the last several years to be as Depressing as it is baffling.

HOW can NR be running Parker this badly, and why are they allowing the same rot to metastasize across into Waterman?
What do they think they’re playing-at? 🤷‍♂️

[Heinkle]

 

58 minutes ago, Mercian said:

 

But even Pelikan has a much more coherent approach to its product lines and pricing than does Parker under NR, and a much better website.

Just look at the appalling state of NR’s websites for Parker and, increasingly, Waterman!

• They load very slowly, with irrelevant marketing blurb predominating, and they make it very difficult to find basic information about product ranges;
• they don’t even mention their own proprietary converters that they sell for use with their bottled inks;
• in an era in which ink manufacturers are proliferating (which suggests, to me at least, that there is a large number of people out there who actually want to buy ink), they have reduced the number of colours of ink that they offer;
• they don’t sell through their own websites;
• they don’t even link to retailers that sell all their products;
• the websites have a ‘thrown-together’ or ‘half-built’ feel, and contain out-of-date information.

The whole thing is an absolute mess!

 

 

 

Amen. Allow me to offer a case study - the Duofold section of the UK website (which I eventually found):

• Only one of the pens (a special edition) has a thumbnail indicating its finish - the four standard model finish boxes are empty
• The Platinum Jubilee Duofold is presented as still available - is it? I actually don't know, but the late Queen's Jubilee was two years ago (and she has since passed). There wasn't a King's Coronation model (2023) produced.
• The latest addition to the Duofold line-up (the Pioneer) does not have a "New" label in the corner, yet the 2021 100th Anniversary model (which I suspect is out of production at this point) does!

[Azulado]

On 4/10/2024 at 7:53 PM, Glenn-SC said:

Does anyone know how many pens does Parker sell per year?  With the plethora of copies available, someone wanting a Duofold is going to be looking for a higher end more expensive pen.  Inexpensive “Duofold style” pens in myriads of colors and trims are readily available.  Parker can probably only compete on exclusivity.  

I've googled this data a few times. There are companies that offer it, but at prices that only an organisation that uses it professionally can afford. In other words, they are beyond the reach of a simple user. You can get a summary, with percentages of the different groups, without a breakdown of sales by model. 

[75-FP]

I am very late to the party on this one but this is a topic I have spent a lot of time thinking about. My quick summary of the current situation is this: I am glad Parker is still around but it is sad, if not somewhat inevitable, that they are languishing as a division of Newell.

 

Why I am glad Parker is still around: A Jotter purchased at a local retailer nearly 20 years ago was what got me into collecting pens and thus I have always had a soft spot for the brand. Since then, I have owned numerous Parkers and my all-time favorite pen is my late 80’s 75 Cisele. I recently purchased a Jotter XL and think it was an excellent and overdue update from an ergonomic standpoint. I have also owned several newer Sonnets and other modern Parkers over the past few years and always felt their quality was decent enough. 

 

Why I am sad to see them under Newell: A few local companies in my area are or have been owned by Newell so I have some direct and indirect knowledge of how they run things. My sense is they are just the classic stereotype of a giant, faceless, multinational company solely run to keep the stock price high at the expense of everything else. I had a boss who had spent the majority of his career with one company that had been family owned but was later sold to Newell and he had lots of tales about the shift in attitude, corporate culture and kinds of people this attracted and none of it seemed conducive to keeping a beloved brand authentic. Because of their structure I see them as having not been equipped and thus completely missed out on the recent resurgence in fountain pens. I see the recent relaunch of the 51 as a great example of this. The screw on cap completely baffled me and the pen just overall felt engineered to a price point. I inadvertently was an internet troll when correcting their social media person on Instagram when they proudly announced the original pen had been launched in 1951 (and which drew Geoffrey Parker into the comments section) but that complete lack of very basic detail spoke volumes to me. As others have mentioned Wing Sung makes a darn near accurate homage to the original for way less. As a minor aside I’ve always felt Waterman has somehow been able to maintain more autonomy than the other writing instrument brands for reasons I don’t understand.

 

Why I see all this as somewhat inevitable: First and foremost, ballpoint pens. I had never even encountered a fountain pen until some years ago. In my mind they have effectively replaced fountain pens and moved everyone away from owning one or two pens you will write with forever to cheap, disposable pens that seem to multiply in drawers overnight. Obviously Parker was a ballpoint innovator and still makes/sells them but overall, I see the entire writing instrument industry as having long moved on from something like a 51 and the kind of buzz it could create when it first came out. Nicer and by extension fountain pens are now a niche product and industry. Beyond that I just don’t see companies like a mid-century Parker existing anymore. I would love to see Parker still making pens in Janesville and Newhaven but from a corporate calculus standpoint consolidating much of production at Waterman in Nantes makes sense. Additionally, most family businesses don’t seem to survive beyond the 3^rd generation which is what seems to have happened with Parker. I personally think the UK division takeover breathed new life into Parker and I really like the designs and directions they went into as an independent company however my understanding is they simply didn’t have the resources to stay that way forever.

[Heinkle]

7 hours ago, 75-FP said:

I personally think the UK division takeover breathed new life into Parker and I really like the designs and directions they went into as an independent company however my understanding is they simply didn’t have the resources to stay that way forever.

A really interesting contribution to the thread.

 

I sometimes imagine what could be made of the Parker brand with the right buyout. For example (and many may disagree), creating a Duofold Centennial “Grande”, which would be a Centennial closer in size to a Pelikan M1000 or a 149. Oversized pens are in fashion and if we’re honest, they need a jump start because no mainstream fountain pen influencers are talking about Parker.

 

Look at the buzz around Montblanc’s 100th anniversary compared to the muted (overpriced) Parker release in 2021.
 

In any case, Newell must be making money from Parker as a corporate cost code, so wouldn’t sell. And you’re right that anyone with the resources to complete a takeover would similarly treat the brand as a cash cow to justify the investment.

[deuter]

On 4/11/2024 at 5:46 AM, Heinkle said:

I dread to think how accurate an assessment this is. 
 

Let’s also not forget they show no signs of understanding their audience - they presumably sit around in board meetings pondering the volume of Jotters and Vectors they can palm off to schools and supermarkets. 
 

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Duofold is discontinued altogether before 2030. 

I do love my Duofold, brings a smile on my face everytime I open it to write with it.

Bought it about a month ago, so well built nothing like your other mainstream Italian Pens.