Stabilo Bespoke

Via Instagram, I saw these Stabilo beauties posted and was quite curious. They are Stabilo pencil models offered only for customizing by advertising pencil printers. Normally these kind of pencils contain no branding from the manufacturers, but those manufacturers do limited branded runs for the purpose of providing sample product to prospective customers. I was fortunate to be permitted to grab some of these samples myself from bespoke German seller Dein Pen.

What I love specifically about Stabilo’s bespoke lines are that they use a technique for manufacturing their slats that leaves the back end of the pencil unchanneled and thus when the slats are joined, the end can be finished with the raw wood and no core showing. Stabilo is the only maker I have seen that uses this technique other than the Bosco line first produced by Japanese furniture maker Gotanda Seisaku-sho and later reproduced by Colleen woods. The latter sell around the internet for several hundred dollars per set, and outside these samples, a batch from a bespoke manufacturer will set you back about the same, but for a lot more pencils.

None of these amazing pencils are available in consumer retail version, with one exception, which I had previously noted in my prior post on Stabilo. The company puts out a line of school pencils called the Trio, which contains the same slat capping feature. These I have actually used, and really enjoy them, but I have not yet sharpened the stubs down far enough to see where the core ends. This at least tells us these pencils are as fully functional as those that send the cores all the way through and just saw off the end, and that this more refined attribute can be produced affordably.

This is the first product I have received free of charge, but this post was not a condition of my receipt of these goods. I’d like to thank Benjamin at Dein Pen for being kind enough to send them to me.