Friday, October 01, 2010

Reviving the Blackwing: First Day Sales Update

First of all I want to express my personal appreciation to all of you who have shown interest in the new Palomino Blackwing thus far and are now supporting us with your orders on our first day of this new product sales on Pencils.com. We also received a nice bit of publicity today from the Boston Globe, in the multiple forms of an article as well as a video post from Globe Columnist Alex Beam.

The sweet music to our ears is that we are well ahead of the inital projections I had made for the opening 24-48 hours. At this point we essentially met my initial forecast for that period within the first 12 hours of sales. Our small Pencils.com team in our home office is busy focusing on completing and shipping as many of these orders as we can accomplish today since we want to do our best to maintain our normally high standard of prompt shipments. I appreciate the patience of some of you who will have to wait until Monday or Tuesday for our shipments to go out as we just won't be able to get all the orders out today.

I need to especially thank our core Pencils.com team Paula, Dave, Joey and Philip for all thier hard work in preparing for the Palomino Blackwing launch. As well as Vincent for his assistance on the supply side with both our Japanese producer and our sales agent team in Tokyo. Without this groups dedicated and collective commitment we would never have been able to experience such a strong initial launch today.

I fully expect the initial rush of orders to taper off after a day or so. However, it's clear we'll be needing to make an additional expedited airshipment from the balance of our intial production run presently being completed in Japan. Otherwise we will not make it through the approximate 45-60 days from now we'll have to wait for the main portion of the shipment to come over the water as we're probably 2-3 weeks away from a ship date from Japan on the balance of the production. Should we end up short of product for a few days to a week we will be notifying any of those with backorders of a projected ship date. Note that we have limited order sizes through the initial lauch period to try to spread around what we have to as many new customers as possible.

Thanks again for everyone's support. I very much hope you enjoy your new Palomino Blackwings and this day will become a bellwether of good things to come for the future of the the Blackwing.

7 comments:

Andy @ Woodclinched said...

I'm excited to get mine! I ordered it early, so maybe it'll go out today, but of course I'm just happy to be able to get some at all.

Congrats on a job well done, and I look forward to seeing this blow up in popularity!

B2-kun said...

Thanks for keeping us posted on the development and release of this promising pencils. Just placed my order and really looking forward trying them soon.

John said...

This is very exciting! The video piece on Boston.Com was great -- when was the last time there was this much excitement in this country when a pencil came out?

I didn't realize ya'll carried General's stuff on Pencils.Com. I couldn't resist adding some semi-hex pencils to my order. And plans to carry more General's gear (he asks selfishly, lol)?

JAbbott said...

It has been interesting following all the updates and reading the details around this process. Can't wait to get my Blackwings in the mail soon. Thanks!

John Celestri said...

Chuck, thank you for the Palomino line of pencils and for adding the Palomino Blackwing to your stable. As you know, I am a classical, old school 2D animator and a quality pencil to me is like a finely crafted instrument is to a musician.

For many years, before becoming aware of the Palominos, I'd been terribly disappointed with the many so-called "quality" pencils on the market---I have a very sensitive touch and I found even the Tombow 4B lacking in its ability to react to my touch on a sheet of paper.

I am so very happy to now have a Stradivarius with which I can create my performances for the movie/TV screen!

Looking forward to many years of drawing enjoyment!

Nikira said...

I ordered mine today. Are you planing to sell erasers for Blackwing separately or it won't come out when used up? I got new sharpener for Blackwing and point protectors, so I'll be fully equipped.

Anonymous said...

I got my pencils today and they are wonderful. The pencil writes so smoothly,

Thank you for bringing them back!