Hi Pen Fans!
With Thanksgiving approaching, last night my wife and I were speaking about where our business anniversary officially falls (honestly not being sure). Some of you might remember that when this little business of ours started, it was actually called “Pencraft”. Back then, I was making what were basically kit pens, but they didn’t really look like kit pens. I was using just a few components from kits to make our pens which gave me a bit more creative freedom. While these were pretty nice pens, I always wanted to manufacture all of my components and strived for this. When I accomplished this, it was with the Pearl model. At that point, I decided that “Pencraft”, wasn’t the best name for this business, and so I switched the name to The Edison Pen Company.
It was around that time that I went through my third layoff in only three years from a pharmaceuticals job that I had unfortunately learned to hate with a passion. Pens had always been part time. With this third layoff, I had no intention of making a living at pens, thinking of it as a silly dream. I just kept making pens on a very small lathe in our garage to bring in a little income and stay off of unemployment. I intended to scrape by until I found another crappy job in pharmaceuticals.
Well, good things started happening. I’m proud to say that I never collected even one unemployment check. With a little income and (albeit slow) growth, I realized that making pens full time showed the possibility of paying the bills. So over about 6 months, I stopped interviewing. But it was not easy. The first year of doing this, our net income was $17k, which did not get us by without dipping into accounts that we did not want to dip into in order to cover our basic living expenses. It was a bit risky and stressful at first, but working hard and working smart led us to where we are today. Over the years we have acquired more advanced machinery (with more on the way) and a large space with more room to grow into. Our Signature Line is in demand, and we have retailers for our Production Line across the globe. There are five of us full time and we are considering hiring more. We couldn’t ask for better employees as they truly care about the quality of our work as well as our customer service. All of use here at Edison are very happy doing what we do and have fun making your pens!
This leads me to our official anniversary. I’m not sure that I count our days operating as Pencraft as anything official since I was part time and not offering the same products that we do today. So out of curiosity, last night I dug through my old paperwork as the official anniversary date has always been kind of ambiguous. The very first invoice that I wrote as Pencraft was November 12, 2006 and the first invoice written as The Edison Pen Company was on October 18th, 2007. So officially, Andrea and I consider this to be our anniversary, and we didn’t realize that 10 years had already passed!
So from all of use here at Edison, we’d like to say thanks to our customers! We are all able to work jobs that we truly enjoy and we consider ourselves very lucky in these regards. All of us have fun making the products that we do, and we thank you for supporting us! As we sit down this weekend with our families to give thanks, we will also give thanks to all of you!
We truly appreciate your support over the last 10 years!
