If you're of a certain age, there's a good chance that one oddly specific office product was part of your childhood: the Gelly Roll pen. We have to have them – and we have to collect every possible color. However, the history of Gelly Roll pens goes back much further than you might think. The Gelly Rolls, invented by the Japanese company Sakura Color Products Corporation, were just one of many writing instrument innovations - I honestly had no idea the history of office supplies could be so interesting.
Let’s dig a little deeper, shall we?
Sakura Color Products Company began not as a pen company but as a crayon manufacturer. What's more, the Osaka-based company was born at a specific time in Japanese history: Founded in 1921, it flourished immediately following the Taisho period, when free-form drawing was just taking off. Japanese artist Kanae Yamamoto's theory that children's creativity should be encouraged and that free-form drawing could help inspire them was quite revolutionary at the time. All it takes for it to really take off is an easy-to-use, colorful medium.
Demand for this medium led to the development of Sakura's first innovation, which was introduced to the world in 1924: a highly pigmented crayon called Cray-Pas, designed to improve on some of the limitations of crayons. Unlike crayons, Cray-Pas layer and blend well without the mess that crayon powder does. In fact, the name itself describes exactly what this product is: it's a combination of crayons and crayons. Given that Cray-Pas were originally developed for children, it's no surprise that I remember using Cray-Pas in art class as a kid; while they might be a little messy, their bright colors are enough to blow standard crayons out of the water.
As the decades passed, Sakura began to focus their attention on the development of professional ink technology, which led to their next invention: a line of permanent markers featuring a technology the company calls Pigma ink. In the United States, the Sanford Ink Company introduced the first pen-style permanent marker in 1964; it was called the Sharpie and could write on almost any surface, from paper to glass, plastic, metal, and stone.
However, markers, and all other permanent markers that came out in the decades that followed, used dye inks, which are susceptible to contamination from UV light, chemical degradation, and other kinds of oils or chemicals commonly found on paper. However, the Pigma, introduced in 1982, was not dye-based; It's pigment-based, which means this ink can withstand everything that dye-based inks can't. Today, Pigma ink pens remain a favorite among comic book artists for their brightness and opacity.
Meanwhile, the first water-based gel pen was developed in 1964 by another Japanese company, OHTO. By the 1970s, gel pens had become quite common, but while Sakura was interested in exploring this new type of pen, which combined the ease of use of a ballpoint pen with the elegant, wet-ink look of a fountain pen, the company didn't just want to do what others were doing. What is done on the form. Instead, they saw the invention as a springboard: knowing that this new pen technology existed, what could they do with it that was different from other products on the market?
The answer is gel ink. (You can see where this is going, right?) Although stationers and pen companies have been trying to figure out how to make gel ink work for a long time, no one has yet created one that works. Formula - So in the early 1980s, Sakura formed a research and development team dedicated to solving this problem.
Why choose gel ink? Because it solves common problems in oil-based and water-based inks, especially when used in ballpoint pens or ballpoint pens. Because these types of inks remain liquid, they are easily affected by gravity - so if you store a pen using them in such a way that the ink pools at one end of the pen, you will find that the ink flows when you try to write with it Often a lot is skipped. (Ever struggled with a ballpoint pen that looked like it had a lot of ink in it, but just couldn't write? That's what I'm talking about here.)
However, gels have a property called thixotropy: when the gel is stationary, it solidifies, but when it moves, it becomes liquid again. So, an Apen that incorporates these qualities into its ink will solve the whole "why can't my pen write?" problem. Problems faced by oil-based and water-based inks.
By 1982, Sakura's R&D team had successfully produced usable gel ink, and by 1984, they had designed a pen that could use gel ink. It's called a Ballsign pen in Japan - a portmanteau (as used in Cray-Pas) that combines "ballpoint pen" and "signature pen" (the Japanese word for felt-tip pen). In 1986, Sakura established a North American branch; a few years later, Sakura Color Products approached Sakura of America with the hope of introducing Ballsign pens to the United States. However, marketing research encouraged them to introduce the Ballsign as a completely new pen, rather than simply marketing the Ballsign as a ballpoint pen, which meant giving it a new name.
Peter Ouyang, Sakura of America's vice president of marketing, explains on the brand's website: "We didn't just build a brand, we created a whole new pen category. I lost track of how many names moved back and forth between Japan and the U.S.— We wanted to capture the quality and essence of this pen in an engaging and descriptive way. When we decided to use the Gelly Roll brand name, we crossed our fingers." And so, in 1989, the first Gelly Roll pen arrived in the United States. : A black pen, a blue pen and a red pen.
But interestingly, it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that Gelly Rolls really hit its stride in the United States. During this time, Sakura had been working on developing new inks for Gelly Roll, and in 1997 he discovered something significant: an opaque, reflective ink that was used in fountain pens and marketed as Gelly Roll Metallic. Unlike ordinary Gelly Rolls, Gelly Roll metal pens could write on both white and black paper, which made them a real novelty - and subsequently they became a huge hit among schoolchildren.
My first jelly roll was green metallic; it was a gift from a friend. what about you? This is my favorite pen . I'm glad it's still available today - you can buy it individually or in multi-packs of Gelly Roll Metallics products. It still looks exactly like it did when I was 12 years old. Man, I miss that.
Worth noting: Pentel introduced the "Milky" pen in 1996, which was actually a variation of the brand's hybrid gel pen, so Milky pens and Gelly Roll Metallics took off around the same time. They have similar characteristics—that is, they both come on dark paper—but the Opal Pens corner the “cute and pastel” market, while the Gelly Roll Metallics cover the “edgy and cool” market. What's interesting to me, though, is that they arrived within a year, so do whatever you want with that.
Regardless, Sakura continued to create new varieties of Gelly Rolls throughout the late '90s and early 2000s: Gelly Roll Lightning (now called Gelly Roll Silver Shadow) and Gelly Roll Stardust came out shortly after the metal's huge success, and in In June 2000, Sakura color products won the Japan Patent Office Director's Award. The award officially recognizes Sakura as the inventor of the world's first gel-ink pen.
And they're still going strong. Most older Millennials—those of us who were around when Gelly Rolls first came out—think of them as a staple of every back-to-school season, even though most of us were in our teens They are no longer used. (Personally, the deciding factor was that they looked a little "youthful"; I eventually swapped my Gelly Rolls for Pilot Precise V pens and haven't looked back.) Given the wide variety of Gelly Rolls that exist now— and their availability; in my day you could only find them in specialized stationery stores, but now you can buy them in any old office supply store - it's safe to say that business is booming with every generation Discovered the joy of colored pens. Their elementary and middle school years are just like ours when we were kids. This is the cycle of life. Or something else.
Maybe I'll go buy myself a green metallic gel roll this weekend. Just, you know, for old times sake. After all, what's the point of being an adult if you can't act like a kid from time to time?
