“The Luxury Gap”
It’s always nice when you can start a post with the title of a fabulous 1980s album!
Confession time again (almost another 1980s classic album title – answers on a postcard to…): I love a good bit of stationary! I adore notebooks (I go through several every year) and I have to blushingly admit to getting wet about ink!
For over 20 years I’ve been the proud owner of several gorgeous writing instruments by Mont Blanc. My first (and probably still my favourite) was the Meisterstuck rollerball, followed by the matching ballpen and then, in 2005 – as a gift to recognise my standing on the summit of the eponymous mountain – the Meisterstuck LeGrand fountain pen!
This is probably the closest I’ve ever got to being a ‘brand junkie’. Normally I avoid all this brand crap. But with Mont Blanc I was genuinely a lover of their products. So much so that I have bought several as meaningful gifts for meaningful people.
The rollerball is my go-to day-to-day pen and I adore it.
But because it gets taken everywhere it is prone to being lost or damaged.
Years ago I was in London and it fell out of the inside pocket of my suit jacket, landing on the pavement and sustaining a crack to the barrel. Because I was in London I was able to find a Mont Blanc shop (they call them boutiques, but to me a place where stuff is sold to the public in a retail manner is called a shop!) I produced the pen, showed the problem to the ‘boutique colleague’ (or whatever bollocks they were titled) and they arranged for a new barrel to be posted to my home address. I’d like to say that it was free, but the fact that while I was there I bought a Mont Blanc briefcase for my (then) wife probably means that it wasn’t!
Sure enough, a few days later a well padded jiffy bag arrived with a new plastic barrel and in 30 seconds I’d unscrewed the old one and screwed on the new one. Dead simple. Fixed.
And a great customer service experience. Fitting of a luxury brand.
Sadly this year, and for the second time in it’s life, my beloved rollerball hit the deck. And for the second time this resulted in a cracked barrel. I figured that things would have moved on since last it attempted escape, and I’d be able to order a new part via the Mont Blanc website. After all, it is a simple plastic part that owners regularly screw and unscrew (when changing a refill).
However Mont Blanc have decided that user part changes are simply too common (not as in ‘frequent’, as in ‘unsophisticated’!) and we (as discerning owners of these instruments) should not sully ourselves or dirty our hands with the mere replacing of a damaged part. So now there is a total “return to base” policy on any repair, however simple or easy to rectify.
Living in Lancashire there aren’t a whole lot of Mont Blanc ‘boutiques’ around. The closest I found is in Selfridges in Manchester’s Trafford Centre.
On 22nd September 2024 I took my rollerball into the store and handed it over to the Mont Blanc ‘colleague’ for return to Germany to fit the replacement barrel.
I was given a receipt (so I’m OK that it will come back), but no cost quotation or anything. It needed to go back to head office for an assessment of the damage. Even though it is visible and simply requires a new plastic barrel.
Tomorrow it will be exactly three months since I parted with my pen. In that time I have had no phone calls, no emails, no repair quotation. Nothing.
You can dress it up how you want, but this is the furthest thing from a ‘luxury’ customer experience that it’s possible to get. It doesn’t make me feel ‘lucky’ to own a pen that I can’t use. One who’s maker is so up itself that its products have to be sent to another country because its user is too important (or too stupid) to be able to assess his own problem!
Seriously, to refuse to supply a user-changeable part and to insist on the whole thing being sent backwards and forwards between European countries is not luxury. It screams of wastage and makes a mockery of any environmental policy. At the same time it denies the user (me) access to his favourite pen.
And with pens, as with things like clothes, cars and the like, our favourite is often the one that we are used to. Which is generally to one that we have and that we are using regularly.
While I wait for my Mont Blanc’s return I’m enjoying using my Leuchtturm1917 Drehgriffel Nr1 Bauhaus Edition rollerball, with a Caran D’Ache fine (0.5mm) black rollerball refill. It is a design classic. It has a lovely weight. It writes beautifully. It costs £27.50.
At the time of writing that’s £417.50 cheaper than the Mont Blanc Meisterstuck.
And I’ve just bought one each for my son and step-son for Christmas.
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