Our Black Friday Philosophy

Dear reader,

Every year, Black Friday brings out the dark side in our beautiful species. Stores are plundered, the supply chain almost explodes and organizations treat their customers as means to as much profit as possible in one single day. We don’t like this type of unnecessary consumerism. 

Never have, never will. 

We love developing fantastic products that are extremely beneficial to those for whom it was intended: the digital artist. But as a company, you do find yourself in a hypocritical position. On the one hand, you need to sell products to exist and on the other, you don’t want to shove your products into people’s faces. This position has proven a difficult one to find a balance in as we scaled our marketing, product development, and operations in the last year. 

In the next few weeks, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the upcoming holiday season will test our psyche. But when we didn’t do anything for these events in 2020, we had quite some disappointed customers. Note, the paradoxical position. 

So this is what we’ll do this year. We’re committed to inspiring the digital artist throughout all of our activities, this includes finding a balance between adapting to expectations and standing by our philosophy. So, we’re merging Black Friday and Cyber Monday into one event that we call Black Cyber Weeks. We’re doing one straightforward deal for anybody that orders our products in this two-week time frame.

We’ve never sent out an email that wasn’t informational (check out our newsletter) and when we did squeeze a deal into an email as a test, unsubscribes went through the roof. In our November newsletter, we’ll announce that we’ll only send two emails in the holiday season, on the first day of the sale and the second to last day. We’ll assume that our customers would like to be notified. 

With this holiday season sales strategy (or HSSS as snakes like to call it), we keep our foundation of only selling to those who see the same benefit in our products as that which we developed them for. We think this adds on perfectly to the way we have run Pen Tips since day 0: only purchase in line with demand, give back with every order, maximize the use of sustainable materials, and stay committed to our purpose. 

We hope you enjoy this upcoming holiday season and that you may spend as much time with your family and friends as possible. And always feel free to email me if you have any remarks about how we do things: marc@pen.tips. 

Keep creating,