Community Survey 2017

SECTION 1: Demographics -

Question 1.1: Current age:

About the question: I wanted to get age ranges for users, it is often difficult to gauge how old people are on sites other than Facebook. This way I can see the general age of the community as well as later correlated data later.

The results: Right out of the gate my first question had a big problem with it, I don’t know why I capped the “and above” age range as 50. I’m not that yo ung so I shouldn’t have considered 50 that old, my apologies to those who this made feel old. Also from a numbers point of view the amount of people who fit into the 50+ category made the information gained diminished because there were too many to gain good statistical data from.

Question 1.2: Gender

About the question: Again like this Information isn’t that exciting so but still interesting when it comes to understanding the community as a whole. I sort of had an idea that Men out numbered females in the online community, so this information is not really that ground breaking for me, but it was still interesting to see the exact numbers.

The results: nothing special about these results

Question 1.3: Left or right handed.

About the question: As a left hander myself I was very interested in how many other left handers there are in the community. In my other hobby, Golf, it is estimated that left handers make up around 10% of the community. This translates them not willing to invest in making some more complex clubs for left handers because the return on investment for companies isn’t there. I personally don’t feel that left handed vs right handed in Fountain pens makes much of a difference so it is less of an issue…but still an interesting thing to find out.

The results: nothing special about these results

Section 2 – Pen Collection

Question 2.1: Fountain pen user or Fountain pen collector?

About the question: This question was inspired by a video that Matt Armstrong (the Pen habit) did right before he went to the Seattle pen show where he was talking about how he considers himself a collector and how he prefers pens that look pretty that can be displayed nicely, or that have some unique value to them. He also goes into how there are other people that seem to be more fountain pen users that value function over looks. I personally identify with the second category of a fountain pen user so I was interested in how many others shared this idea.

The results: So either I didn’t do this question justice or there really truly are few people who identify strictly as a collector. This was my first surprise from this survey, I expected the results to be closer to 50-50. Perhaps next year I’ll get some help from a person who identifies as a collector (Matt Armstrong Collab maybe?)

Question 2.2: How many pens do you own?

About the question: Of course everybody’s pen collection size is very different, but I really was curious if people tended to have lots of pens or if more people kept a handful of pens they use often. Many bloggers and youtubers have collections that are 60, 70, 80, or 90+ which is staggering. But most people I would assume do not have the money for that kind of thing and will either sell pens they don’t use or simple not buy that many.

The results: As the results show the vast majority of people tend to have somewhere around 4-10 pens in their collection. This sort of supported my theory that most people will have a handful of pens that they would use. The second place grouping was for people with 11-25 pens in their collection which seems like the people who like TWO handfuls of pens to keep around.

Additional data on Question 2.2: How many pens do you own?

About the data: I was curious if there was a direct correlation between how old people are with how many pens they have acquired. My idea was that people would likely buy a pen every few years to then have a larger collection when they get older, or people would go on a binge of buying pens in their mid to late 20s when they have more money to then have them acquired when they are older.

The results: The results sort of supported my hypothesis, showing that people who own <3 pens steadily decreased as they got older. Additionally the groups of 26-50 and 50+ pens steadily increased as people “get” older. This can also be seen from the increase of from the 4-10 and 11-25 groups that increase then decrease. Maybe next year I will make the groups smaller, or allow people to input the exact number that they own.

Question 2.3: Top 3 favorite pen brands?

About the question: There is always a debate on any forum or social media site that people talk about their favorite brands. I thought it would be interesting exactly which brands has the most fans. First off I want to say that the google document form was not able to limit answers to 3. So I want to thank the vast majority of you who know how to count, however there were numerous individuals who not only chose 1 or two extras, but many chose 5 or more. And there was one eager individual couldn’t choose any less than 9 favorites. Unfortunately for data’s sake I deleted the excess because google documents only sorted the responses alphabetically and I could not see what they chose first.

The results: The results were semi surprising. I had a feeling that Pilot was going to be #1, but I was surprised just how much love pilot got. More than half of all participants included pilot as one of their top 3 brands. For those who see these numbers the % of total does not add up to 100% because each person gave up to 3 responses, so I divided the number of votes by the total number or survey responses (1,326).

Question 2.4: Grail pen?

About the question: Everybody has different ideas for what their perfect pen would be, but I wanted to see how many people share the same goal. I think perhaps I should have had a description to say what a grail pen is. To my definition a grail pen is a pen you will strive for as the ultimate purchase, it is most often an expensive pen because that is usually what keeps a pen like that out of reach. I think some people understood the question as a pen in your collection that you cherish above all other. I’m not suggesting that a TWSBI Eco cannot be the ultimate perfect pen to some people but I think more likely I should have explained further.

The results: As expected there were a lot of different answers and some were very specific. I did my best to sort the answers and make the results uniform. Because there were so many different answers I was able to pull two pieces of information from this list. The first was which brand has the most votes for grail quality pens. Second, which specific pen had the most people wanting to purchase it (regardless of specific color or nib preference)

Section 3 – Ink Collection

Question 3.1: How many inks of major colors do you own? (What the question actually said: how many different colors of ink (major colors, not individual shades))

About the question: Obviously this was a major oversite on my part. The idea behind the question was to find out how many colors of inks people owned. For example I own 3 colors of ink, Black, Purple and Orange. I own additional shades of purple and two different brands of black which makes them unique. This was by far one of my worst questions not only in the wording but the fact that in the following questions when I gave the choice of favorite color I listed 16 different main color options so the amount of people that chose 5+ is the majority because I just didn’t give enough options.

The results: the results are not surprising because of the terrible way this question was formed. I’ll post this data but there is little to learn from it.

Question 3.2: How many unique colors / shades do you own?

About the question: As a follow up to the intended previous question I wanted to know how many shades of ink that people have. Much like the last question where I stated that I have multiple shades of purple and multiple shades of black. I was trying to start to find out how deep into their favorite colors people would go. I wanted to see if people would research colors first and therefore only buy 1-2 colors of each of the shades they have or if they would buy inks to then test in person. But since the pervious question was mal-formed I can only show how many unique inks that people own.

The results: The data is more spread out than I expected having. It seems the largest grouping of people have more than 21 unique inks but the majority of people It seems somewhere between 3 – 9 inks. The chart shows all 3 of those groups as the same percentage which is true but number of votes shows they were very close with 21+ winning by only 1 vote and the groups 3-5 and 6-9 being tied both at 273 votes.

Question 3.3: What Color do you write with most on a daily basis?

About the question: I know that many people will rotate colors especially when you have many to choose from but I was curious to see if more people maybe use black or blue or blue-black on a daily basis. Or maybe I’m wrong and most people use grey or burgundy. Either way I wanted to see what people would choose as their “go to” or preferred daily writer ink.

The results: This graph is larger not because of its importance, but rather that it has a lot of information in it that made it hard to see if it were small. The results are not surprising the top three is blue, then black, then blue-black. All three of those compose 70% of all the results making it fairly decisive of what most people choose for their daily writer.

Question 3.4: What ink do you use on special occasions?

About the question: As the previous results confirmed, when people choose a daily ink they will likely use blue, black, or blue-black. But when writing for special occasions like letters, journaling or other applications what do the majority of people use?

The results: As graph below shows, the range of colors is much more even. It seems the most popular is Purple, followed by Blue and then Turquoise. I found the fact that Blue was so high on the list interesting. I suppose maybe people use a different shade of blue than their daily ink, however I also did not check how many of the people who chose blue as their daily ink also use blue as their special occasion ink.

Question 3.5: Shimmer or Shade?

About the question: One problem with this question was I only gave the two options. Obviously there are more options than just shimmer or shade, but there was a debate going on in the sub-reddit that only listed those two, so with those two in mind I made this question. I think in the future I’m going to break it up into 3 or more questions where I will have the participants choose their preference individually i.e. Shade vs solid color, Shimmer vs non shimmer, Sheen vs non sheen. This would

The results: For the limited results as below, there is a little to take away from it to say that Shade is both very popular and Shade is possibly over represented on social media. However due to the nature of this question the results are not perfect.

Question 3.6: Shimmer vs shade reason?

About the question: Originally, I was curious about what made someone like an ink feature over another.

The results: Due to the original question being badly formed the results of this portion are not very meaningful. In addition to this, sifting through the results there hard to determine because the answers were vague and it covered a wide range of answers either defending their choice or putting down the other. But for the most part most common answer had to do with Shimmer clogging pens.

Question 3.7: What are your top 3 favorite brands for Ink?

About the question: Much like the pen manufacturer question, I know there are some brands that people tend to like more than others, I wanted to find out which brands people enjoyed the most as compared to others. I have to say though there were very few people that chose more than 3, so either they read it better this time or people are not as fond of many brands.

The results: I actually surprised by these results, I had initially expected Pilot to be #1 due to the popularity of their Iroshizuku line of inks that I felt like makes up the vast majority of inks used posted to social media. Perhaps that is something that is unique to specific social media sites (data I did not do a correlation but is available for those who might be interested, email me). However the list of the results was not surprising most of the major brands are represented, I did not have any initial thoughts on exactly how popular each brand was but this just gives me an order.

Section 4 – Daily use.

Question 4.1: How many pens do you carry on a daily basis?

About the question: Personally, I carry 6 pens in my carrying case, it isn’t that I need 6, its rather that I have a 6pen case so I fill it up. When given the chance I’m going to get a 3 pen case because that’s really all I need. I was curious if other people carry many pens either for colorful note taking, or maybe people want different pens with different nibs, or maybe people just carry one. Either way I was very interested in finding out.

The results: It was interesting for me to learn that the majority of people carried 2 pens with them. I was expecting to see groupings of people around the 3 and 6 pen groupings because that is the normal sizes that pen cases come in. however the data shows that there is a fairly even distribution between people who carry 1, 2, and 3 pens. Combining the responses of 1, 2, and 3 pen carriers it shows that 68% of all responses carry <3 pens per day and only 22% carrying 4 or more.

Question 4.2: How Do you carry your pen(s)?

About the question: As I mentioned I personally carry my pens in a Visconti case which I consider a “hard case” because it is ridged. I personally find this perfect for my life because I throw a few pens it in and that I can toss into my backpack and feel secure about my pens while I take them to work. Obviously I’m not like most people and I wanted to know exactly how everybody carried their pens. In this question I put an “other” category and there were many different answers but I was able to narrow them down to the ones you see below. The common theme was that people had other things that were not necessarily designed for pens that they adapted to use for pens.

The results: For the vast majority people have “soft specialty cases” which thinking back could mean a case with a soft leather outside that has some structure to it, or it could mean a floppy fabric case like a Nock co. case. Either way it would appear the majority of people either have a soft case or they carry their pens in their clothing pocket.

Additional data related to Question 4.2: How do you carry your pens / how many pens do you carry

About the data: So with wondering how people carry I was curious if people tend to carry more if they have specific kinds of cases.

The results: This kind of data you should not compare the groups to each other but rather the bits of information within each section. So it would seem that people with soft specialty cases typically carry 2-3 pens. And as expected people that carry their pens in their clothing pockets are the most likely to only be carrying one pen with them where they go. It makes me wonder about the 4 people who answered they carry 8 or more pens with them on a daily basis AND carry them in their clothing pockets…

Question 4.3: How do you use your pens?

About the question: I use my pens for work and school, but I was curious if the community as a whole is like me or if more people use them for calligraphy or maybe only use them for journaling, especially in modern times when you can take notes and do all your necessary work on a computer or on a digital medium. I was curious to see if people had reserved their FP use to

The results: because these selections are not mutually exclusive this information doesn’t mean that just because more people use the pens for work and school that would translate to them not using it other ways. The way I look at this data is that perhaps Novel writing and short story writing is something fewer people do, and for the most part people use fountain pens in most aspects of their day. Since all of the data is fairly even that is how I interpolate this data.

Question 4.4: On average how many pages do you write?

About the question: Nothing really exciting about this, I figure for those of us who choose to use a fountain pen we would likely prefer to use a pen and paper rather than any kind of digital device, so with that I was curious on how many pages the average fountain pen user would write. But to me it would be a measure of how much people like writing and or how familiar they are with their pens.

The results: There is a clear peak at two and then steadily decreasing from 2 until very few do 6 or more. Probably the spike at 7+ is from the people that write short stories or novels.

Question 4.5: Fine vs line thickness?

About the question: This was another question that people didn’t seem to like because it wasn’t all inclusive. Granted this did not take into account the people who prefer to write with medium nibs and above, but in the end I still feel like this question is valid, but next time I would put an option to opt out or say “neither is a factor”. For me I try to find a balance but line thickness is important to me taking notes because I like a fine line and also a thick line while it might look nice on a letter, it makes notes look messy and hard to read later. However, on other social media posts often times people will argue how Japanese fines are so much finer than European fines almost suggesting they are 1 or two ratings wider. So I was interested to find out exactly how many people prefer having an extra fine line. While some would argue that the finer the line doesn’t necessarily mean a scratchier feel, the general rule is that when you are dealing with fine and extra fine nibs there is more of a chance there will be scratchiness due to the lack of material at the tip.

The results: I had expected the bulk of people to say they wanted a balance between the two, and I had expected an equal distribution between the remaining sections. I was surprised to see that more people so few people really craved that a fine line over all other. But then again if we as fountain pen users wanted fine lines and didn’t mind scratchiness then we probably would have stayed with ballpoints.

Section 5 – Purchasing.

Question 5.2: Where do you usually purchase?

About the question: There wasn’t much information to derive from this but I was curious how most people purchased their pens. I had initially wanted to list out every online vendor but I was not confident in my ability to list all of them so I just decided to clump them all together.

The results: As the data confirmed most people do buy from online specialty retailers. I was surprised how many people purchased their pens from amazon.

Question 5.3: How do you research a pen you are interested in buying??

About the question: This was another question that people had a problem with. The idea behind this was, where do you go first to get your information about a pen you like. As in what source would you trust the most? I know a good shopper should exhaust every resource to make an informed decision so I felt like everybody would click a “all of the above” or even just select all of the options. That is why I chose to make it a select one. Again this is something I should have specified in the question.

The results: It seems that the most reliable source that people voted as YouTube, this I can understand because I also like video reviews where you can see a pen in action and see how big it is without any photograph alterations that just make the image look better but distort the dimensions. After that it seems that people also trust peers that post reviews on forums.

Question 5.4: what criteria is most important to you when considering a pen to purchase?

About the question: For this question I needed to have a better list of options. I had initially intended for there not to be an “All of the above” option because I knew that if given the option most people would choose that because if you choose a pen over exactly one criteria you are likely overlooking things. I wanted to create a though experiment such as to make people think what was the first disqualifying criteria they might have for a pen. Given the hypothetical scenario of a friend telling you “have I saw this X pen online I think you would like it” to that you would respond “does it/is it___________”. Again I didn’t portray this well in the question.

The results: I did my best to comb through all of your responses because I wanted everybody to be represented but in the end the data became what you see. Many answers were similar enough to the pre-given answer but were written in a different way. But from this we can see that looks and a smooth nib are the two main factors that will make a pen successful.

Question 5.5: Other than grail pens, what is your normal price limit when buying a pen?

About the question: Of course grail pens could be a couple hundred, or even a couple thousand dollars depending on what you are looking at. But I have seen some debate before about how much most people spend on pens that they plan to use daily. I was curious if people were more concentrated on value or if people would have a price limit that would allow them to buy mid-range pens.

The results: Looking at the results the majority of people have chosen $50 as their limit. And then the next grouping is $100. I would be interested to find out next time if I break things down even further into smaller chunks to see exactly how much people spend on daily writer.

Section 6 – Community information

Question 6.1: What was your First fountain pen?

About the question: we all started somewhere, we don’t always choose the best pen, sometimes the pens are handed to us, but either way those pens are something special to us (or so I assume). So I was wondering what everybody’s first pen was

The results: Not to my surprise the Pilot Metropolitan came in #1. What was surprising that the Metropolitan is nearly more popular than the next two combined!

Question 6.2: gift a fountain pen to a friend?

About the question: So since we have a lot of experience in this hobby and we seem to know what we like, would what would we recommend to a friend that would be interested in this hobby, would we recommend the same pen or would we offer something different.

The results: As with many people’s first pens the Pilot Metropolitan is by far the undisputed champion this come certainly beating out the next two combined. But one of the most interesting things is the TWSBI Eco. Only 22 people had them as a first pen but that number had the most significant increase to the number of people who would recommend this a first pen to 130, nearly a 600% increase! While I did not do a correlation of this data to see how which types of people offered it but it would seem that the community does have a growing fondness for this pen and would suggest it as a first pen.

Additional information from Question 6.2 and 6.1: For the most popular pens did those also suggest the same pen?

About the question: After seeing how many people’s first pen was the Pilot metropolitan and the Lamy Safari, I then was wondering, Would people gift the same pen that they had as their first pen, or would they not enjoy that pen enough to then decide to start their friend off

The results: The interesting champion of this is the TWSBI Eco. While only 22 people ever had it as their first pen it rose to 3rd place as a pen that people would gift with 130 votes, so while the Pilot Metropolitan would lose

Question 6.3: What is one thing you wish you knew when you first started?

About the question: The idea behind this question was to compile a great list of great advice that we could put together and make sure we inform people who are new.

The results: However, every response was so unique it made it impossible to sort them in to anything meaning full, this might be a separate post all to itself. So unfortunately there is no way I can compile this into any kind of meaningful data at this point.

Question 6.4: Do you know anybody in real life that uses fountain pens?

About the question: I think this question is fairly self-explanatory. Fountain pens are not that common to use so it is reasonable to think that people would likely not know many people in real life that use them, which is why we go online to support each other :D

The results: it really isn’t surprising that more than half of us know nobody or less than 5 people that use fountain pens.

Question 6.5: Have you converted anybody to the using fountain pens?

About the question: Fountain pens always make a statement at work or at school. So naturally people will comment on it, either with intrigue or try to put you down. In this question I didn’t suggest people were going door to door like Jehovah witnesses but rather, having a friend that is interested in what you are writing with and they picked up the hobby too.

The results: I was not surprised that a lot of us have not “converted” have “converted” only a few people, what I was surprised at was there were a few people that said they converted 11+ people, that must be fun for them to have so many people around them willing to give it a shot.

Question 6.6: When telling someone about Fountain pens what do you use as the main reason they should give it a shot?

About the question: a

The results: I am and I am not surprised at these results, I have to say that certainly using a fountain pen makes writing fun so for that I’m not surprised that it won, but I’m surprised that it won by such a margin. I expected more even answers, but it goes to show in this hobby that is the main reason.

Question 6.7: Which community sites do you use to learn / talk about Fountain pens?

About the question: Most websites will say how many members they have and or how many are active at that given time, but I was wondering how many active users there are and how each site compared to each other.

The results: I was slightly surprised by these results, not that the Fountain pen network was #1 but more than the other forum sites were not as represented. This could however just be a sign of “this is where people came to take the survey” meaning that just because a site isn’t represented here doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a substantial community.

Additional data from Question 6.7: For a given community site, how likely are people to be members of which other site.

About the question: I was curious if there was a correlation between people being on one sight to being on another. I was wondering if people generally stayed on one site or maybe if people attempted to be members of all the websites.

The results: Again with the sheer size of this I am only going to show the graphs that I have as it relates to the top 5 just because the amount of data otherwise might be just an overload. One thing I’ll note on these graphs is that when it says the same network. It means that survey takes are ONLY members of that site and not members of anything else. One interesting thing is some of the people who are only members of some sites, such as Goulet or YouTube even found the survey since I didn’t post the survey there.

1. Fountain Pen Network

2. Reddit

3. Facebook

4. YouTube

5. Instagram

Members of only one site.

Additional data from Question 6.7: Community sites combined with demographics.

About the question: as it was pointed out to me on one of the community sites, my “verbage” and style of asking people to the survey was perhaps not properly tailored to the demographics of that particular site. So I was curious about the demographics of all the sites. Which sites generally have the youngest audience, which is typically oldest, which is the mostly male, which is mostly female.

The results: Due to the size of each of these graphs and I’m not so sure about how interested in this you all are I only listed the results for the top 5 sites. But according to this Reddit is the most Male dominated site and Instagram has the most female presence on it. Facebook seems to be the site with the oldest average age, and Reddit seems to have the youngest average age.

1. Fountain Pen Network

2. Reddit

3. Facebook

4. YouTube

5. Instagram

Overall / side by side

Question 6.8: What is an opinion you have that the general fountain pen community seems to disagree with you How many?

About the question: There is no good way to ask this question and honestly, I just wanted to see if people had a general opinion that they felt that the general community didn’t agree, for example Brian Goulet has said a few times that his unpopular opinion is that he feels Cartridge converters are the best because they are so easy to clean and maintain.

The results: as to be expected a “dislike” of something is a more powerful feeling to share than someone thing that you like so most of these results are “negative”. I was able to sort these through category etc. there was a lot of information here and this section in particular took me the most time to sort through.

Question 6.9 – 6.10: what is one pen you love but it seems like most people don't like? & what is one pen you dislike but it seems like most people love it?

About the question: I know there is a lot of disagreement in the community when it comes to specific pens so I wanted to see if someone really loves or dislikes a specific pen but keeps quiet about it because it seems that the majority of the community doesn’t agree with them

The results: The results of this were so sporadic and also many of the answers were the same as their previous answers to question 6.7 where they said an opinion that they had that was unpopular. So, for this I’m going to throw out these questions because they do not yield any additional information.

Final thoughts:

Again, I want to thank everyone that took the survey, it was a lot of fun to read everybody’s responses. I need to do a better job myself…. or more specifically I need to have help next time. I need to have more careful consideration for what each question is asking, while they might make sense in my own twisted head I understand that it might not translate well to people who live outside my head. While a lot of this information was surprising, I think those who spend a lot of time on the forums it might not be so surprising but I hope this information is at least little interesting. I fully intend to do this survey next year to see what things might change and to see how the community grows. Who knows I might be able to collaborate on the survey with the major names in the fountain pen community to really make this a fun and interesting yearly event!

If you would like access to the raw data spreadsheet please email me at rustydarkmatter@gmail.com. please provide a reason why you wish to have all the data. I do not wish to hand out the data to everyone, even though there is no personal data in the results I don't want the data going out to anyone and everyone. THANK YOU AGAIN!