Kudos to the Namiki/Pilot Pen Conp8

I bought a namiki vanishing point fountain pen about 15 years ago or so. Maybe even a little longer. It's a pretty cool fountain pen because it is engineered where you click a button and a shield retracts from inside the barrel to allow the nib to extend. Basically, you can use it like a fountain pen with a clicker on top, and you don't have to worry about either the pen leaking or drying out of ink.

Anyway, it does not have a lifetime warranty, but just a regular one year warranty, I think. After 15 or 20 years using it, the internal threads on the plastic lacquered body have worn out, and they lose hold when you attempt to depress the button sometimes. It results in the pen being unusable.

So I contacted the company today to see if they would repair it or if they had any replacement parts or if they had any suggestions so that I could use it. They asked me just to send in the barrel, and they would replace it with a new pen, since they no longer made the vanishing point. They make a very similar one now called the capless one, which some still called the vanishing point, as it operates the same way.

So it cost me the postage to send it to Jacksonville, Florida and I get a new $100 pen. They even offered me my choice of pen colors, and I took the opportunity to change to a burgundy color, from the black color of the original one.

Thanks again, Namiki / Pilot.

Cool story. They do not cost a hundred bucks but I once sent in a 25 year old Zippo lighter for warranty work and just a few days later a brand new one showed up in my mailbox. This works great for plain jane lighters, but if your case has been decorated or monogrammed you will lose that feature in the process.

I love good customer service stories like that. I like to patronize companies that go the extra mile for their loyal customers.

If I wanted to be hypertechnical, the old pen that I had was actually a little more expensive than the ones they are making today. But the nibs and feeding mechanism are the same and interchangeable, and they allowed me to keep the one that I had before. That was 99% of the difference in price.

I completely agree about wanting to patronize these kind of companies.

Dan, I had heard the same about Zippo before. No questions asked, and they would fix or replace a lighter. I'm not sure if that was anecdotal, or if that is advertised as such, but you're not the first person that has told me such a story.