Making Their Point
As students at Stanford University, Lily Kim, Shu Lindsey, and Adrian Mak had trouble finding the precision pens they liked to use, the Japanese made ultrathin ones with tips half the width of the average ballpoint.
They started importing their own in 2004 and turned their passion into a business, pooling $9,000 in savings to launch JetPens. They built a customer base by e-mailing fellow students and contacting artists they found on the Web.
JetPens now sells 10,000 pens and other items every month. Among its best-sellers are a pen with a tip fine enough to write on a grain of rice, novelty erasers (some that look like packs of gum or pieces of sushi, another designed to never run out of corners), and the “popcorn” pen, with ink that puffs up on the page, a favorite with scrapbook fanatics.
Photo by JetPens.
FranchiseBrief.com on April 25th, 2007 3:26 pm
I used to own a piece of “jewelry” with my name written on a rice grain when i was a kid. I bet they used that type of pen to write on such a little medium!
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