Weight and Perceived Value - Are Heavier Pens Better Quality?

How heavy should a pen be? Should pen makers be trying to make them as light as they can, or is heavier better? Thinking about it purely as a tool, it seems that most people would find light-weight to be better - less weight to hold while you’re writing or drawing, and less weight to carry.

But we’ve probably all either had the thought ourselves, or heard someone else express the thought, that a pen has ‘a nice bit of weight to it’. Makes it feel solid. Like there’s some sturdy internals in there. Makes it feel expensive. But does that extra weight really mean the pen has more expensive materials and construction? Are heavier pens better quality?

We sometimes hear of manufacturers adding brass weights inside their pens. After making their pens with the very best materials, people trying the pens don't see them as being high quality, because they're so light. They add the weights to improve the perception of quality and value.

Interestingly, the same problem would be unlikely to happen in Japan. There, light weight is more commonly seen as a sign of quality. Good materials are often light, and it shows there’s no extra added, and maybe more precise manufacturing has avoided extra material being used.

Tombow, in Japan, used to make a range of carbon fibre pens. Their metal parts were an especially lightweight alloy of aluminium, and the barrels were super-simple tubes of carbon fibre, so they weighed very little. Tombow were very proud of making some of the lightest pens available.

We’ve seen carbon fibre pens in the West where a thin tube of carbon fibre is overlaid on a brass tube, so the resulting pen is still ‘nice and heavy’. Carbon fibre is known as a quality, expensive material, but the whole point of it is that it’s very light and strong. It’s used in racing cars, where no expense is spared in the pursuit of less weight (and pursuit of the car in front, of course, but the weight reduction helps with that).

It seems somewhat ridiculous to intentionally add weight to something made of carbon fibre, to make it feel more expensive, but here in the West, the association between heavy and expensive is strong.

Different people have different tastes, of course, and many people find a bit with a bit more weight to feel better in their hand, making the pen feel more stable in use. So if you do prefer a heavier pen, don’t let us put you off, that’s perfectly valid! We’re just saying that heavier isn’t always better - sometimes the extra weight is just there to give an impression of quality.

Are we saying pen manufacturers should stop making pens heavier unless they need to be heavier? Well, no. Their customers want the pens to be heavier, so of course they’re going to make their pens that way - they want their customers to feel like they have a good quality pen. We just think it’s interesting.