When you work full time in a product specific industry, you find you start to notice other related products around you more and more. In my case, I’ve noticed that I am looking a lot more closely at every promotional pen and promotional pencil that I see, triggering off various work-related thoughts in my mind. This makes it rather hard to switch off sometimes and I confess I’m becoming a bit of an anorak when it comes to personalised pens and personalised pencil designs & techniques and am building up quite a collection of the ones I see for comparison!

Talking to you as someone who works in the promotional pen industry, I find that I am very comfortable talking in industry terms and connotations, which isn’t at all surprising, especially as my business involves dealing with the trade on a daily basis. That said, it’s easy to overlook the multitude of times that I’ve experienced something on a more personal basis that has made me either laugh, smile or grit my teeth and I thought I’d share one of those examples with you today.

One of the most popular items we provide to the trade are our wide selection of promotional pencils. On a recent trip to a certain large Swedish based home store (yes, that one!), I was happily wandering around with my family, exploring the store and it’s products..as you do. It took a little while to get used to their ordering service, which involved taking a small pre-printed sheet of paper and an equally small promotional pencil with the store name on and noting down the items details to collect later on.

Hours later we finally emerged from the massive store, a few pounds lighter in pocket and a somewhat exhausted but with a slight grin on our face knowing we each had a rather nice collection of mini personalised pencils in our pockets which bore the store name and proudly boasted that we had been there. Our smug looks however, were shortlived.

A hour or so later, we finally collapsed at home and began to inspect our purchases, at which point our Son, who bore a suspiciously large grin, came in and showed us his collection of fifty three Printed pencils he had ‘borrowed’ from the store…yes 53, he had counted every single one of them! Our prized single wooden promotional pencil that we each had, suddenly looked rather unimpressive and although we did our best to put on our angry parents faces, we had to hide a smirk or two. Those printed pens are now in various pencil cases in various children’s school bags, each one taken home to an unsuspecting set of parents every night. I’m sure the store would have paid good money to reach an audience of people that wide, that quickly!

I suppose the legend of the story is that promotional pencils work in a way that we may not always expect. Their appeal goes beyond anything we could hope to target and their final destination and the number of people that view them on their journey, is a totally unknown factor. We can guarantee only the initial audience of people get to see the business logo..after that..who knows where they will end up!

As far as promotional gifts go, promotional engraved pens rank amongst the most popular items used on a daily basis. Our vast range of metal promotional pens ensures that there is an option for everyone to aid any marketing drive or corporate event.

If you are looking to promote your company, whatever your requirements, using one of our many Promotional Metal Pens from our corporate pens range will definitely put the right message across. We also engrave all our metal pens in house at extremely competitive rates, for that added touch of class to belie a pen’s cost even further. Our range of promotional metal pens cater for every budget, starting from as little as £0.30 per unit and can be customised with your own logo or corporate message by either printing or engraving on the pen, providing an impressive and permanent impression of your logo.

The Pen Warehouse offers high-quality, corporate pens that come in a vast array of colour options, to compliment any corporate colours or logo. These ideal corporate gifts can also be used as prestigious promotional products of executive gifts worldwide and are always appreciated. We strive to give you the best value, low prices, quick quotes, fast delivery and high levels of service whenever you order pens from us.

Our range of promotional metal pens include the popular Parker Jotter Ball Pen- an extremely well known promotional gift, now available with engraving on the metal top part of the pen. Engraved pens are a great to market your brand identity and promote your business effectively and The Pen Warehouse is your solution to ordering engraved metal pens.

Keep tuned into our newsroom here at The Pen Warehouse – the home of printed pens – to stay up-to-date on the latest offers and products available for laser engraving.

There are thousands of printed items on the market, but how do you know what promotional product to use, to best advertise your company to represent your company. There is one promotional gift that is suitable for every promotional campaign and that can fit any budget- Pens.

Have you ever thought of how many times you use a pen a day? Pens are one of those items that are guaranteed to be used on a daily basis, which is why conversant companies use them as gifts and as giveaways at exhibitions and conferences.

Using promotional printed pens for your advertising campaign is the best way to gain someone’s attention as you can ensure it will be used time and time again. The Pen Warehouse offers a vast range of personalised pens starting from as little as £0.10 to over £5.00. All of our pens comply with the latest UK and EU legislation and are available with fast turnaround times to meet those important deadlines.

If you’re looking for an exceptionally distinctive gift for your larger clients, have a look through our executive range of Promotional Metal Pens. We can offer metal pens in a range of colours, suitable for any budget. They can be printed, or engraved for that added touch of luxury and also have presentation boxes available to further belie the pen’s cost.

Promotional pens have long been used as a means of gaining widespread exposure as each and every time your customers use them, your business is publicised to potential clients. In addition, your brand is given more exposure and will get people talking about the great experiences they have had using your company for all their promotional, personalised and printed pens.

Keep tuned into our newsroom here at The Pen Warehouse – the home of printed pens and pencils- to stay up-to-date on the latest offers and products.

Contour ball pens are one of the UK’s top selling promotional pens around and there is little wonder why- manufactured to extremely high tolerance levels, their price point belies the quality of these pens.

The range consists of the traditional Contour BallPens and Contour Argent Ball Pens, as well as two new additions to the range this year- the Contour Extra Ball Pens, which has a white barrel and the Contour Max Ball Pens and combined highlighter- an exclusive product to The Pen Warehouse.

Each pen has a smooth, push action mechanism, sculptured body with chrome trim, and an ultra soft rubber grip for added comfort. There is a colossal colour range available including two new additions to the Contour of Aqua and Magenta, so you are guaranteed to find an option that compliments your corporate logo and colours.

Our technical abilities have allowed us to develop a method of printing a larger print area than anyone in the industry at present. Our new print area is 35mm x 10mm, with an extended print area tapering down to 23mm x 3mm.

The Contour Extra ball pen is a new addition to the range this year, which is a modern twist on the Contour Argent. With its crisp white barrel and choice of 10 colourful grips, it offers a great contrast to compliment your corporate logo.

Another innovative addition to this personalised pens range is the Contour Max, as it offers a two in one pen and fluorescent highlighter, matching the trim of the pen.

The Contour, Contour Argent and Contour Extra ball pens are all available on our 3 Day Express Service for all those last minute deadlines, just ask for more details.

Keep tuned into our newsroom here at The Pen Warehouse – the home of printed pens – to stay up-to-date on the latest offers and products.

The Concerto range of ball pens comprise of the Concerto No.1 and Concerto No.2. This range of promotional pens is a time honoured favourite, as they combine both quality and value for money giving this range of promotional pens universal appeal.

They have a lacquered metal barrel, offered in two colour options, chrome trim and come with an extra large black refill as standard- the preferred colour for completing formal documents and for photocopying. The Concerto No.1 ball pen has a smooth black rubber grip whereas the Concerto No.2 is fitted with a comfortable black ribbed rubber grip for that added touch of class. Its mechanism also offers a near-silent twist action, making it a perfect ball pen for environments where noise isn’t tolerable.

We have developed an entirely new system of printing that now allows us to print over the majority of the barrel as well as in multicolour, exceeding the industry’s standard.

This range of executive pens is also available on our new engraving service for an added touch of luxury. To complete their great look, these personalised pens are also supplied in free presentation tubes as standard and are also available on an optional express service, to meet any last minute deadlines.

We are also able to send out a free no obligation sample to you once you have chosen the style you want, so get in touch and see how we can help you advertise your corporate message using personalised pens.

Adding a pot of promotional printed pens to a reception or office area is an effective way of carrying and advertising your company name at all times. People are always in need of a pen, so what better way than to provide them with one that may get your company name recognised by a wider audience.

Keep tuned into our newsroom here at The Pen warehouse – the home of printed pens and pencils to stay up-to-date on the latest offers and products.

We think we are great at designing pens and servicing our customers but we are not so hot on telling you about all the stuff we do. Hopefully we can rectify that in time but in the meantime I want to tell you about our digital merchandising service for pens and our range of promotional pens on particular.

We have a small but effective in-house facility for producing banners and we use this service for producing digital media for our exhibitions and roadshows. It is not a commercial part of the business but nevertheless we can provide bespoke roll up banners for exhibitions for our pens and design them for our distributors at cost. To keep the price down we buy the cassettes in bulk from The Far East and print the graphics here at The Pen Warehouse. As I said we are not geared up for doing 100 banners if that is what you want but we can do single banners to support our loyal distributors. Banners are about 1.8 metres high and 850mm wide and we can print them in full colour. Print quality is extremely high and we only use the best graphical backing material so they will stand a lot of use. Give us a cal for more details.

We can also supply display posters and snappy frames for your office and showroom displaying each of our printed pens. These can also be personalised with your details for that bespoke look; you are bound to impress you customers when they visit your showroom.

Why not give us a call and we can explain our full support services and also keep an eye the latest news here at The Pen Warehouse – The home of printed pens and personalised pens.

You know, the business of selling pens to the trade has changed dramatically in the last ten years. Then it was simply a matter of paying for entry into business gifts catalogues and possibly producing the odd personalised pens catalogue of your own. Nowadays, the level of support primarily because of digital imaging and the internet is awesome.

Here at The Pen Warehouse, we have built up a library of quality images over the years including photographic images and vector drawings. Tens of thousands of hours has gone into the making of this library and it is being added to each day. It would be true to say that photography of promotional pens and digital manipulation at The Pen Warehouse is a permanent job for a number of people. Do we need to go to this expense? – Not really is the answer. Fortunately or unfortunately our MD was a professional product photographer and consequently he insists that we set the bar very high. He takes many of the images himself in high resolution on a large film gallery camera – none of that digital rubbish where constricted dynamic range, artefacts and weird colours are the order of the day. No Siree – good old fashioned film 10″ x 8″ transparencies drum scanned for the perfect results. This is the standard set by National Geographic for many of its top images and dare I say it ‘Playboy Magazine’ where outstanding gradation of colour is paramount.

It is amazing that twelve years works can be condensed onto one single DVD, but it can and it is freely available to our distributors for your website, catalogues or any form of digital merchandising. Why, we have images of printed pens that can be produced for pop up banners 6 feet tall without a pixel in sight and razor sharp edges – that’s how good they are. Just ask our sales department for your DVD and we will get it off in the post to you today.

Keep tuned into our newsroom here at The Pen Warehouse – The home of promotional pens and pencils.

Pens come and go and this is very true of personalised pens in particular as the promotions market chases the latest in design. However, some promotional pens stay around forever and probably the best example of this is our time-honoured printed pen; namely our range of  Giotto Ballpens.

With its metal upper part and high quality injection moulded barrel, rounded off with a chrome plated metal nosecone, this pen oozes traditional values. Indeed it has often been compared to the range of Parker Jotter Ballpens, which we also stock and is a much less expensive option. The body houses a black refill with an extra large reservoir of German documental quality ink = the preferred colour for completing formal documents and also for photocopying. It is a firm favourite then with Solicitors, Police Forces and the Legal profession.

These pens are great as advertising or printed  pens because the barrel can be printed in up to six colours and we can match these very closely to the shades of your choice. The barrel comes in five traditional colours and complements the upper chrome part of the pen perfectly. This pen operates on a push-button mechanism and we can supply a range of packaging options to suit every budget. Of particular note is our range of pen tubes that barely add any cost to the product but is the perfect accessory when you want to impress.

If you would like something even a little bit more exclusive we can also supply this pen in an all-metal construction. The barrel is impact extruded from solid brass, then chrome plated and finally a protective lacquer is applied to reduce smearing during use. These are The Giotto Metal Ball Pens which also can be supplied with a matching mechanical pencil as a boxed set. Although these look really expensive, they are in actual fact very reasonably priced.

Keep tuned to our daily news report from The Pen Warehouse – The Home of Printed Pens and Pencils.

Pens, or more specifically personalised pens don’t just have to be standard off-the -shelf promotional items – they can be supplied as custom pens as well.

By this I mean not only can you rely on the printed message to carry your corporate colours, you can also have the colours of the pens themselves either mix and matched or moulded in a specific shade. We refer to this type of personalisation as custom pens or bespoke pens. Here is a list of options that The Pen Warehouse can provide.

Mix and Match Pens:

• Kiki Fantasia: This belongs to the larger Kiki Pen range that is available in a range of standard colours. The Fantasia Range refers to a type of pen personalisation that allows these standard component colours to be arranged to your specification. With the Kiki pens this refers to the barrel, upper body and clip. This allows for an endless amount of permutations to suit your corporate identity. You can also have these as printed pens by asking for personalisation on the barrel and the clip. Minimum order for this is just 1,000 pieces
• X-Three Fantasia: These are two-piece pens for advertising – barrels and clips. The minimum order quantity is 3,000 pieces and are a more cost-effective option to the Kiki Pen range
• X-Five Fantasia: These pens must surely be the ultimate in personalisation. You can mix and match the nosecone, rubber grip, barrel, lower cap and clip giving you an endless choice of combinations. We don’t stop there as not only can we print the barrel and clip we can also print an inner cylinder that rotates inside the barrel that is visible when a transparent barrel is chosen. Minimum quantity here is 1,000 pieces.

Special Coloured Pens

• You can have any pen in our range moulded to a specific colour reference of your choice. Pantone matches can be fairly closely matched but please bear in mind that these references are translucent in nature and our pens will be opaque – consequently do not expect the same brilliance in colour. However, this has never been an issue on any order and we also offer an optional pre-production proofing service for your peace of mind
• Minimums start from 5,000 pieces. Please call for more information.

So, no matter what you want we can cater for it in terms of colour options.

Keep tuned to our daily news bulletins to hear the latest offerings on promotional pens from The Pen warehouse

I have done a few news items now outlining my thoughts on the direction that the route to market for pens but more specifically promotional and personalised pens is changing, particularly where online trading is concerned. In summary, we are seeing many distributors becoming importers and trade suppliers and there are also strong indicators that seemingly trade-exclusive suppliers are either sponsoring, working hand-in-glove or ‘cloaking’ to secure route to market. What is The Pen Warehouse’s answer to this?  Will we consider going direct at some point in the future?

This is a question I am being asked with increasing regularity by distributors because the more enlightened ones can see what is going on in the war for route to market. Here in the UK we have a long history of being ‘exclusive’ rather than ‘inclusive’ in the way we operate in the promotions industry. Our two trade bodies are not inclusive in any way as membership dictates that it is fundamentally exclusive. We see the same thing with general promotional gift websites and catalogues that are seemingly even-handed but in reality are heavily biased towards one supplier or another. Indeed there are many so-called trade catalogues that exclude some trade suppliers altogether as they see them as a threat to their own overt or covert operation. It is little wonder therefore that some distributors see the writing on the wall for the traditional methods of distribution prevailing, particularly as there seems to be less incentive for trade-exclusive suppliers to remain so.

Here at The Pen Warehouse, we have no intention whatsoever of going direct to the end user by overt or covert means. We have every confidence that a large body of distributors have a  strong preference for dealing with trade exclusive suppliers providing that we deliver great customer service benefits. However, we do not simply want to stop there. The Pen Warehouse has always provided benefits to distributors that are creative and groundbreaking and we intend to continue in this vein. So far we have helped revolutionise the printed pens business by introducing products and services that were industry-firsts, leaving our competitors to simply try and mimic what we are doing. Here are just a few.

• Largest and most comprehensive Pen Catalogue Anywhere in Europe
• The first company to introduce 24 hour service
• The first pen supplier to supply both recycled and biodegradable pens
• The first company to supply pens with recycled refills
• The first to offer an anonymous pen website to the trade
• The first Germ killing Pen with modern technology
• The first to offer low volume orders in full colour
• The first to offer high quality product images in all colour options
• The first and still the only trade supplier to actively support their loyal distributors by passing leads to them.

Really, the list goes on and on and that is not to mention what we have planned for release in the next few months and years. We believe that innovative approach to trade supply keeps us ahead of the competition. Competition, by and large that is bereft of creative ideas; whose best attempt to retaliate is to copy and plagiarise and in doing so are destined to be second-rate forever. We hold great respect for our loyal distributors and in turn they recognise our contribution to the industry by way of our innovative approach that helps stimulate interest with the end-user and ultimately leads to more orders. That is our way forward, it is unique but we have the wherewithal and the determination to ensure we stay on this path into the foreseeable future.

Stay tuned to our news items coming to you on a daily basis – The Pen Warehouse, home of promotional pens.