My apologies for the infrequent posts. It seems like the past few months have found us on a never ending road trip. China, New York, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Miami, Boston, Chicago,Bentonville,Providence, LA are a few of the highlights.  Some of the pictures above are from the road. With all this travel I have finally been bumped up to elite status on US Airways which means I get automatic upgrades to first class. Makes a big difference   All you can drink, eat, read, etc. Its almost relaxing at this point to sit in first class for a red eye to New York. I’ve had some of my best 3 hour naps on these trips.

Since we last left off we have now picked up CVS, Staples, OfficeMax, the Navy, and Office Depot Canada.  At this stage our goal is to secure enough financial resources to bring this company to the next level of success. We are very excited about the response so far from the market and look forward to launching the child’s “Twist N’ Write and Ergo-Sleek version next month.The best thing we can do now is to master the accounts we have built up, service them well and expand our presence in the stores. The idea is not to spread ourselves to thin and risk losing any of these major players we have on board.

We were lucky enough to get some great press these past few weeks. The biggest was another spread in the Wall Street Journal. The story is to long to post so the link is here. We were told the picture was one of the biggest ever done for a feature story in the Journals history. http://www.startupjournal.com/columnists/enterprise/20061114-bounds.html

 We were also fortunate to get this nice story from Mike Cassidy from the San Jose Mercury News.

Cassidy: Modest creator of PenAgain enjoys success

By Mike Cassidy

Mercury News Columnist

When I wrote on my blog that Colin Roche, the inventor of the PenAgain, probably wouldn’t return my calls these days, he did.

Return my call. I was stunned.

This is the PenAgain, people, the wacky wishbone-shaped ballpoint sweeping the globe and igniting a writing revolution. I couldn’t imagine that the rebel Roche would have time to talk to me.

I hope I don’t sound like I’m making fun. I did that once, and I’m writing now to say I was wrong.

“I don’t remember it as bad as you wrote it,'’ Roche, who grew up in Palo Alto, says of my blog post about our first encounter, www.mercextra

.com/blogs/cassidy/2006/11/13/

i-know-how-to-pick-em/.

It must have been three or four years ago that Roche wrote to me suggesting a column about his ergonomically correct and aesthetically challenged ballpoint pen. I took one look at the homely thing. I considered the too-cute tale about how he invented it during detention at Palo Alto High School. I took a pass.

PenAgain a hit

No way was a freaky pen going anywhere, I figured. And the high school detention story? What do I look like? Somebody who would believe that Internet powerhouse eBay started because Pierre Omidyar’s girlfriend needed a way to build her Pez dispenser collection?

But now the PenAgain is suddenly everywhere. Wal-Mart is carrying it. Walgreens is ordering them by the truck load. The things are in Office Depot. They’ve been featured on local and national television news and the Wall Street Journal, with a circulation of 2 million, has adopted the company for a series on the trajectory of a small business.

“Since that story broke,'’ Roche says, “it’s been absolutely insane.'’

He says the company has signed up 8,000 more stores as customers since the Journal featured the PenAgain earlier this month.

So, maybe he had a pretty good story after all. But Roche, who lives in San Mateo with his wife and two kids, is a classy guy. He didn’t return my call to be cranky or gloat.

Making over the pen

He can see that a guy who says he’s changing the face of writing might seem a little odd. He can really see it, because now that he and company co-founder Bobby Ronsse are considered the guys who came out of nowhere with the hot new thing, they get calls from all sorts of dreamers.

“It’s kind of flattering,'’ Roche says, “but at the same time, you go, `Man.’ ‘’ As in, man, that’s stupid.

Roche is proof that not everything invented in Silicon Valley is high-tech. With everyone looking forward, he says, maybe there’s an advantage to looking back at old technology that could use a makeover.

It’s not a widely held belief in the valley. It was lonely early on, hanging around with the other valley inventors and entrepreneurs. He’d go to the schmooze fests where everybody’s trying to connect with a business mind or start-up capital or both.

“I wouldn’t say I got laughed at, but I got a lot of interesting looks,'’ he says. “There’d be a Stanford Ph.D. who’d come up with a new way to synthesize DNA, and I’d whip out — at the time I only had a prototype — this funky-looking pen.'’

But now? Now Pacific Writing Instruments, as the men call their company, is getting orders faster than they can fill them. And recently, a would-be investor sent them a check for $100,000 — think of it as an interest-free loan, he said.

Roche swears it’s true. He swears the detention story is true, too, though he acknowledges it could use some embellishment. Seems he landed in detention because he’d accumulated too many tardies. Boring.

“I need to think of something else.'’

When he does, I’m all ears.