Fountain Pen Friendly: Pen Meet-Ups at the Main Shop

As we fumble our way through “living with Covid,” we are excited to announce we are holding some free, very low-key and casual fountain pen meet-ups at the Main Shop. Please come! We’re hoping to run them Saturday mornings before your big weekend activities—just a little fun and stationery inspiration to start off your weekend.

We’ve got two dates set, and you can register via the Eventbrite link.

Saturday, November 19, 10:30-11:30 am - register here

Saturday, December 3, 10:30-11:30 am - register here

Bring a pen or two or more, or any other stationery supplies you might have, well-loved leather pieces, favourite notebooks, we would even take a ballpoint or gel pen. The plan is to go around and introduce our writing things as a big group, and then hopefully have some time for open chatting, sharing, testing, general mingling. Whether you have just a Safari or a whole pen roll of fancy writers, all are welcome to share a little about where they are on their stationery journey.

We’re hoping to run more of these events and other types of events in the future, and if all goes well, in December we’ll post more dates for the new year. Although right now we’re mainly just seeing where people are with events like this, if there’s interest, I’d even like to run one between Christmas and New Year’s, when the shop will be closed for shopping but the warehouse will be still shipping. There is a very special magic about being in a stationery shop while it’s closed, as though we are stationery elves creeping around a sleeping kingdom, admiring the mushrooms and the lotions and potions.

I got this above photo from an old post, and reading these things is always a whoosh of nostalgia. LIFE! How it does you in.

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In any case, I recently learned how to use Eventbrite, which is a system for RSVPing and tickets and things for events, and now I’m going wild. The power of Eventbrite! In days of yore, people used to email us to RSVP to events and workshops and we would keep track of it on these Excel spreadsheets and it was a lot of copying and pasting and back and forth to confirm phone numbers or missing information, and staff would be trying to investigate my cryptic Excel boxes when I wrote things like “customer with the glasses and the long brown coat” under Name. But now we have Eventbrite, which even sends helpful email reminders. What a world we live in.

Alas, Tuna will not be at any events—he being erratic and prone to sneaking in and out of places and also sort of a dummy—but when he does come in, he certainly makes himself at home, getting the place ready for your visits. I still dream, one day, of what the Studio Shop might be like, shop cats sleeping on the inventory, coffee machine puttering, maybe a few people wandering in, lost and looking for directions to more sustainable and useful and profitable shops.