JetPens

I’ve enjoyed buying a LOT of stuff from JetPens lately. They became my first go-to for all the variety they stock, and especially since I started playing more with gel and fountain pens, and since CultPens’s website started giving me weird errors and essentially being unusable on all browsers. But my enthusiasm waned after a couple very long waits for shipments, unexpected costs and slight disappointments with some pen sets.

My first purchase from JetPens was in my eternal quest for the perfect stationery portable, in the form of Lihit Lab “Bag in a Bag.” Not the wisest decision and I haven’t much used it, but it came with some “rider” purchases such as a set of Tombow brush pens and a new Moonman fountain pen.

Since that first grab I’ve bought several more boxes or packs of goodies from them. I have no idea of the intricacies of international commerce, but for some reason JetPens shipments usually (though not always) result in a tax and customs charge when I receive them, regardless of the shipper. Luckily they use a contract shipper that delivers by regular post, which avoids the gouging “brokerage fee” charged typically by UPS and FedEx, but why some shippers and shipments result in these taxes and charges and some don’t will forever be a mystery to me.

One of my recent buys from JetPens was to help my husband in his tentative forays into Fountain pens. He typically takes notes in chunky wire-bound Hilroy cahiers, but these are annihilated with any fountain pen. I grabbed a few French and Japanese papers from Midori, Kukoyu and Clairefontaine in this spiral-bound format. One big difference was that the notebook thickness of a Hilroy 250-page book was averaging 100-150 pages of quality fountain pen paper. A problem my husband ran into, however, is that he frequently moves back and forth between pages in his books of notes, adding new notes as he does so rapidly. This resulted in a smudgy smeary mess, in contrast to the bleedy feathery mess of the Hilroy books. We’re still looking for a happy medium there.

Moving on, my latest craze is pen sets. I’ve managed to grab a ton of pen sets through JetPens, from my box of 74 Sakura Gellyrolls, to boxes from Pilot and Pentel. JetPens also does some “Bundles” of their own to help with the completion of colour collections. Unfortunately when ordering these sets JetPens does not always pack them in the original packing, like this recent set of Pentel Hybrid Gel pens. I find the packaging very important in my stationery as mentioned before, so this was a big disappointment.

Finally, I find JetPens to be a bit slow. Although it’s understandable that international shipments might require some time, the lack of explanation for a nearly month-long wait on 7 items was strange. According to the tracking the shipment was “created” more than two weeks before it actually departed, then sat somewhere for another week before moving along. My assumption is that this is related to using third-party shipping services, which JetPens appears to do.

All in all, JetPens has a huge selection which makes them a good resource, but the information black hole which is their actual logistics and delivery makes ordering them a nervous habit, at least for international customers. Most of their stock can be found through other retailers though you might have to go to more than one source. I recommend caution when using them.