Lamy, a German pen maker, recently caused a stir when it quietly re-released Dark Lilac, a much-lauded ink color. Despite its popularity, Dark Lilac, a rich purple with a golden shimmer, has only been produced once – as a limited edition in 2016.
Its reappearance a few weeks ago was so unexpected that the fountain pen community, which makes up a small but passionate part of the office supplies market, was thrilled.
There was just one problem: it wasn’t the same color.
“There is drama in the fountain pen community,” Aidan Bernal, a 23-year-old fountain pen enthusiast, said at the start of a recent TikTok in which he did his best to explain the saga — a story that included contradictory company statements. Amateur detective work and an elusive shade of purple.
“An absolutely beautiful ink,” Mr. Bernal said in a telephone interview.
The royal fountain pen, which features an internal reservoir for refillable ink and long overshadowed by its ballpoint, gel pen and felt-tip pen competitors, has enjoyed a modest resurgence in recent years. Brian Goulet of Goulet Pens, an online retailer in Richmond, Virginia, suggested that the revival coincided with a trend of consumers returning to analog goods such as vinyl records, mechanical watches and single-blade safety razors.
“The fountain pen really fits in,” he said.
As a teenager, Mr. Bernal was so fascinated by his grandfather’s fountain pens that he searched the Internet for more information about them. There, he said, he found a large community of fellow hobbyists. He now has an online audience of more than 550,000 subscribers on YouTube.
“I’ve been interested in stationery my whole life,” said Mr. Bernal, who works as an engineer in Seattle. “I always had to be the kid with the coolest pencils and erasers in class.”
Given the passion of the community, neither Mr. Bernal nor Mr. Goulet were surprised that Lamy’s reintroduction of Dark Lilac caused such an uproar. Mr. Goulet recalled the release of the color as a limited edition in 2016.
“It crashed our website because so many people wanted it,” he said.
More recently, Mr. Goulet said, small bottles of the 2016 version have been selling for $300 or more on the secondary market, a significant premium over the original retail price of about $12.
But no one expected Lamy to re-release Dark Lilac — until last month, when some European retailers started selling an ink called Dark Lilac.
“Everyone freaked out,” Mr. Bernal said.
Added confusion: Lamy had already unveiled a new ink for 2024 called Violet Blackberry, which many assumed was an homage to Dark Lilac.
However, something was wrong. The lucky few who got their hands on the new Dark Lilac were dismayed to find that when they put pen to paper, the ink didn’t quite match that of the original. According to an early YouTube review, the base color was neither as blue nor as rich. The shine was green instead of gold. And it definitely wasn’t Violet Blackberry.
“Was it a translation error? Some new old stock someone found in a back room? A reproduction? A mistake?” Mike Matteson, a philosophy instructor from Greensboro, N.C., who goes by Inkdependence on his social media channels, said in an interview. “There was no press release or any reference to the product, and so no one really knew what was happening.”
Enthusiasts launched an investigation. Among them was a man who runs an Instagram account called Fountain Pen Memes. The man, who did not want to be named and cited a government job in Brazil, posted an interaction he said he had with a Lamy manager last week in which the manager said the new dark lilac color was identical to the old ink be. In a later post, the account shared an interaction with another Lamy official in which the company retracted that statement and acknowledged that the ink was different.
The man behind Fountain Pen Memes said he believes the company is unaware of the ink’s immense popularity.
On Wednesday, Lamy confirmed to The New York Times that the inks were slightly different. Some ingredients in the original version were no longer available when the company formulated the new version.
“So you could say that the Dark Lilac of 2024 is the old special edition with today’s technical capabilities,” Lamy said, adding that he regretted the confusion. “We should have given our revised Lilac release a different name.”
Mr. Goulet had a few bottles of the original Dark Lilac stashed away so he could make a side-by-side comparison when he received a sample of the new one this week.
“Die-hard Pen fans may point out the differences as if they were night and day,” he said. “But it’s also a very solid effort from Lamy to bring back a beloved ink.”
The ink was barely dry on this fiasco when further news emerged on Wednesday: Lamy, family-owned since 1930, had been taken over by the Japanese Mitsubishi Pencil Company.
“That,” Mr. Matteson said, “is not what I expected.”
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2024-03-01 14:30:05
www.nytimes.com
