When they first hit the scene with their Confidant sketchbook back in January of 2014, NYC-based Baron Fig became one of the few Kickstarter success stories that involved the creation of a sustainable brand rather than a one-hit wonder product. Today, the company has a mini-factory where they continue to crank out the user-friendly sketchbooks for a long list of stockists.
Naturally, the next step for the Baron Fig crew was to look at the other tool that belongs alongside their popular sketchbooks: the pen.
“As you may have already noticed, a lot of what we previously learned about notebooks is applicable to pens,” says the company, which started as a fun project between some friends. “This is because the pen and notebook are married so intimately in use. It was this thinking that helped us create the Confidant notebook, and now the Squire pen.”
The Squire pen, which is the result of over fourteen months of development, was designed after many conversations with a wide range of modern day thinkers ranging from artists and designers to developers and entrepreneurs. The finished design is the result of “hours of research, testing, and discussion [distilled into a quality tool that is] conscious enough to help the creative process and simple enough so that it doesn’t get in your way.”
So what does a tool that is “conscious enough to help the creative process and simple enough so that it doesn’t get in your way” look like?
To begin with, the ultra-minimal pen is milled from a single block of high-grade aluminium. The resulting form is perfectly weighted to rest “invisibly” in your hand with equal weight on each end and a subtle widening between the top and the bottom to keep hands in one place. Then of course, there’s the considered sizing: the Squire is designed to be long enough to be comfortable in your hand yet short enough to fit comfortably in a typical front pocket. “There are no gimmicks, no unnecessary parts,” the company explains. “Just intelligent improvements to a simple tool.”
With nearly three weeks left to go in their crowdfunding campaign, the Baron Fig crew have already raised in impressive $100K with an original funding goal of just $15K (which they reached in just five hours).
Find out more or purchase one of the $50 pens for yourself by heading over to the Squire’s Kickstarter page.
