An ode to the Platinum Preppy

It’s easy to see how making a product for an expert user is challenging. Experts are discerning, they have taste and high standards, they have a basis for comparison. If your product sucks, or doesn’t live up to an expert price point, they will be vocally disappointed. Spent a grand on a Montblanc 149 and you want it to be brilliant.

But experts are also very forgiving. They are comfortable fiddling and tuning to make a product work the way they want. They understand the limitations of materials and manufacturing. They baby their possessions, keeping them in soft cases. They know how to maintain and care for a product so it performs at its best. They are also very willing to pay for quality, which gives you as a manufacturer plenty of margin to play with.

Viewed through this lens, products for beginners are a much more daunting proposition. They may have to survive abuse, with little to no maintenance, from an unsympathetic and uninterested user — and come in at a low price, too. Low prices force compromises in things like materials and QC.

This is why I respect and love the Platinum Preppy fountain pen so much.
This is a pen that weighs in at £5-10 — less than half the price of a Lamy Safari. It is robust. It is comfortable. Above all, it will write: perfectly, every time, even if you last wrote with it a YEAR AGO.

Unlike many £900 Viscontis, the £10 Preppy has an absolutely flawless steel nib, every time. I have owned maybe 10 Preppies, and they have all written with absolute consistency, and a joyous feeling of pencil feedback. The flow through the visible feed is just right.

Capping takes some force, but once the cap is on, there is zero evaporation. Uncap a Preppy from an Egyptian tomb and it will lay down a perfect line with no hesitation.

This is not a big pen, but the Preppy’s section is long and straight, and of course there are no threads to get in the way. It posts, if you’re that way inclined. The cap has a clip. Platinum cartridges have plenty of capacity. The Preppy comes in loads of flavours, including a Kuromi edition that my eldest daughter loves, the crisp white Perpanep, and the Wa editions with Japanese cultural icons (sake and sakura blossom, for example) printed on the barrels.

Artisans like Garagefountainpen have even given Preppies the urushi treatment. I don’t think that’s a silly thing to do, either. I actually really want one.

The packaging isn’t much to write home about. You don’t get a converter (of course, a Platinum converter costs as much as a Preppy). But do you care? I don’t.

I don’t use a Preppy every day. Would I pick one over my £2,500 Tohma, my £1,000 Montblanc 1912? Probably not. But I have two or three Preppies in my desk drawer. I absolutely do not look down on them: they are brilliant pens, especially for the price. I TRUST the Preppy more than any other pen to give a consistently great experience, to any user, at any time. When I write with one, I enjoy it and I wonder why I’m insane enough to spend 100x what this great little pen cost on another fountain pen.

This blog is called Deliberate Objects, and few things are so obviously deliberate as this pen. I can imagine the design meetings for the Preppy, and how clear, decisive, unambiguous the requirements were. It has to be cheap. It has to be robust. And it has to write: consistently, no matter how long it has been in a drawer, and even if we make a million of the damn things. Otherwise, our beginner writer will be frustrated. They will throw the pen away. They will never write with a fountain pen again.

So Platinum’s designers not only hit the brief, perfectly. They helped save this hobby from that worst discouragement of all: frustration. Best budget pen without a doubt.