How it started
One of the biggest pain points I had was the pencils "feedback feeling" which just wasn't there and it was hard for me to have the control over the pencil - working as a fulltime designer and being very well practiced in sketching and drawing you actually have the skills to be the master of every pencil you get in hand. The kind of control that the artists know when using a Wacom Pen on the screen or a pen on paper.
Since the purchase was super expensive I told myself - I just have to practice long enough and one day I will love it. I was hoping my muscle memory will get used to it and I will have the control I was looking for. One year, hundreds of practice hours and 50+ drawings later I was still not used to it and not convinced from the feedback free feeling. This was in December 2019.
One day the frustration was so strong that I started to research for possible solutions. Fortunately it was not hard to find some silicone nib protectors claiming and promising exactly the improvement I was looking for. I was so happy having found the small hope giving thing, that I directly ordered a bunch of them. And you cannot imagine how happy I was to use them. 😍 ...For exactly 2 days - each of them teared off just that fast.🤦🏻♂️ ...And this is what I hate about our current world - so many things are made to be a one time use product or made to last for a very short time. And people still sell it and people still buy it.
These circumstances got my attention. And the PencilLovers story began, right before the Covid pandemic hit us in the beginning of 2020. I was in the middle of the development during the first worldwide lockdown. Tried to get some materials, people, help, support and just some knowledge from different sources. A lot of calls have been made.
After countless amounts of failures and countless of prototypes and almost a year of development I had the first "PencilLovers" from my own handmade home-production and I was ready to share my "PencilLove" with the world. This was in October 2020.
The last and only thing I had to do was to make it official. I went to the city hall to get the permission - needed in Germany - to be allowed to sell products. And that was the second time I realized the impact of the pandemic around us. Processes which took only hours before the pandemic, now took 4 months in my case. 😭 - The permission to sell the product was handed in February 2021. And that is the time since when I am officially allowed to sell my homemade and handmade PencilLovers. 🥳
During the long period of waiting I was working on the quality and the production speed of the PencilLovers. Unfortunately, I was not able to speedup the production in the corner of our living room - but I was able to make the quality much much nicer comparing to the first PencilLovers I wanted to sell in October 4 months earlier. 🥳 …I still have a lot of issues in the production process. So it's still a surprise for me when I get those little lover's without any damage. 😍 - of course I am working regularly on the issues trying to solve them but it’s not always a success.
Meanwhile after 3 years of producing and selling the homemade leather caps, the major internal production issues are solved and the PencilLovers have the best quality they ever had. - And are maybe still improving but at some point the steps are very very little, compared to the steps that I made in the beginning.
If I got your attention and some of you would like to give the original Apple Pencil a new dimension of experience. Don’t be scared to give it a try - you might be very surprised. ☺️
