Craft Design Technology

[Ryan]

Nobody does paper and shit to manipulate it with like the Japanese...

To read the rest of this blog entry from The Gear Journal, click here.

[gatewaysysop]

First impression is that the stuff looks pretty nice. Compared to other sites where I've bought Japanese pens, pencils and cases from in the past, I am somewhat disappointed.

I'm not just talking price but also the argument for the price. If I hit up JetPens or something similar, I can easily spend more money than CDT wants for a pencil, but at least I have a page and a half of high resolution pics and a detailed explanation of what I'm paying for and why. CDT's site is seriously lacking in this area.

Case in point, on each page, you get a paragraph telling you the same line about the company and their products (why?!), then a notably smaller and usually vague description of the product beneath that.

Example -the A5 lined notebook. So the notebook has 'smooth textured paper'... OK... Is the paper something like 80g paper or similar to justify the price? How does it take different inks? Does it feather or bleed through easily? What justifies the $23 price tag? Rhodia is French made, 80g paper and exquisite to write on with almost anything. It costs less. What am I getting for my $23 besides the fact that it is Japanese?

I'm honest to God not trying to be a negative Nancy here, and maybe I've been spoiled by other sites, but this kind of thing just annoys the heck out of me. I was really disappointed by the lack of information to help justify the, IMHO, steep prices.

[Rashy]

Originally Posted by gatewaysysop

First impression is that the stuff looks pretty nice. Compared to other sites where I've bought Japanese pens, pencils and cases from in the past, I am somewhat disappointed.

I'm not just talking price but also the argument for the price. If I hit up JetPens or something similar, I can easily spend more money than CDT wants for a pencil, but at least I have a page and a half of high resolution pics and a detailed explanation of what I'm paying for and why. CDT's site is seriously lacking in this area.

Case in point, on each page, you get a paragraph telling you the same line about the company and their products (why?!), then a notably smaller and usually vague description of the product beneath that.

Example -the A5 lined notebook. So the notebook has 'smooth textured paper'... OK... Is the paper something like 80g paper or similar to justify the price? How does it take different inks? Does it feather or bleed through easily? What justifies the $23 price tag? Rhodia is French made, 80g paper and exquisite to write on with almost anything. It costs less. What am I getting for my $23 besides the fact that it is Japanese?

I'm honest to God not trying to be a negative Nancy here, and maybe I've been spoiled by other sites, but this kind of thing just annoys the heck out of me. I was really disappointed by the lack of information to help justify the, IMHO, steep prices.

I see your point, and it irritates me also.

With the modern web tools, it drives me nuts to look up a product for more information and all I get is a crappy 100X100 pic and half a sentence.

Worse yet, are all teh sites with tiny pics and the "click to enlarge button" click it and you get the same pic in a new window, a slightly larger pic, or even a smaller pic.