Lecce Pen Company – Manufacturer Of Personalised Pens With A Difference – Part 1

My association with The Lecce Pen Company and their range of pens is now in its twentieth year – a very significant anniversary for me. In that time I have seen unimaginable changes, not only in our companies and the way they operate but also in how personalised pens are marketed.

I can remember the first day I ever set foot on Italian Soil and it was for the sole purpose of securing a Lecce Pen distributorship for the UK and Ireland for their entire range of promotional pens. These were the days when European pen manufacturers reigned supreme globally and Lecce Pen Company was the Daddy of them all. In all honesty I had no idea at the time how preposterous my approach would seem to them – I was relatively new to the pen business and only employed a handful of printers in a building that was formerly used as a cowshed.

It is little wonder that I failed in my attempts to gain this distributorship because they were already represented in the UK by Raimart – a leading supplier of printed pens at the time and of course there was that little issue of credibility because I had no pedigree in the pen business. It was a probably case of pity combined with the fact that my audacity (naivety?) shocked them to the point that I eventually persuaded them to let me sell one of their pens they planned to discontinue. It was a horrible square thing that looked like the pen Noah used to document the animals as the entered the ark. I came back and had all their remaining stock shipped to me with not a clue how I was going to sell square pens in a market dominated by modern round ones. After a bit of research I found that the only possible outlet was with foil blockers, usually guys in their garage selling small orders of pens, bookmarks and coasters in publications like Exchange & Mart. It took a while before I sold them all and then went back to Lecce for more and they said…..sorry we have discontinued it!… WHAT!!!!

I could feel my Celtic temperament was going to let me down …again but outwardly kept my composure and asked them for another no-hoper and they gladly obliged. This scenario repeated itself for a year or two and eventually I replaced their existing distributor. In our twenty-year relationship we have sold countless millions of their pens and although a little part of me would like to take some credit I know our success is down to the quality and style of their pens. Indeed a level of quality and style that eventually led to their designs being the most-copied by other pen manufacturers across the world.

In the past ten years we have witnessed unparalleled changes in the promotional pen industry, particularly with the emergence of Far-Eastern suppliers but that will be the subject matter of a forthcoming news article.

Keep tuned into our website’s ‘News’ section here at pens.co.uk – The home of Promotional Printed Pens.