CW&T Pen Type A- 02.14.12
Just visited with CW&T (Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy) who amongst many awesome projects are responsible for one of the most funded Kickstarter design projects… Pen Type-A. Looking to raise $2,500, they ended up with over $280,000… and 4000+ backers (including us!)… and from making a smaller batch of pens, they were suddenly faced with the daunting task of making a few thousand! Beyond the beautiful design and craftsmanship of this solid steel housing for the plastic Hi-Tec-C pen cartridges… it has been incredible to follow the hardships and exciting moments over the last 6 months since they got funded, and even more exciting to finally get our hands on the actual pen! (Spoiler: it feels incredible!) So take a peek at the details and unboxing of one from the first batches of CW&T Pen Type-A on the next page!
p.s. If you find yourself with one in person, you must pull the pen from casing quickly. It’s a great sound.
The kickstarter results are MIND BLOWING, no?
The Pilot Hi-Tec C Pens have quite the cult following… and this steel pen housing/case definitely takes it to a new level.
Truly one of the most amazing parts of this incredible Kickstarter story are the lessons (and horror stories) to be learned about manufacturing, scaling, production in china (while US based), and quality control… the process and adventures to get to these beautiful pens is a MUST READ for designers and anyone looking to figure out producing/manufacturing products independently! The picture above are only a quick sampling to give you a peek at how far CW&T bring you in to the process as they spent months working out the pens!
So after visiting the CW&T studio, we couldn’t resist playing with the pen endlessly over drinks… of course that also meant random unboxing at the bar!
We started dreaming up other ideas that could be fun add ons/variations for the Pen Type-A… one of them being a wax seal chop on the end… or to leave your mark on metal… so we ended up playing with the candle wax and experimenting with the various shapes currently found on the pen…
i can’t wait
----- kwaz 16.02.12 20:37