IT’S A KEEPER: This is one pen you won’t be lending.
French jeweler Tournaire and Bic have teamed up to give the inexpensive Bic Cristal, no less than the world’s most-sold ballpoint pen, a precious update.
Dubbed the Bic Cristal Alchimie, the pen features a bronze body adorned with square, triangle and circle symbols, with a matching metal cap.
Available in three finishes — plated in rose gold, plated in palladium and yellow hand-patinated bronze — the pen retails for 350 euros and is sold on Bic’s website as well as the jeweler’s flagships, including its Place Vendôme address.
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A version with 50 grams of yellow gold and 264 diamonds comes in a limited run of 24. Priced at 25,600 euros, it is sold only in Tournaire flagships.
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And just like their more pedestrian counterparts, these precious takes offer around 3 kilometers’ worth of writing and are refillable.
For Mathieu Tournaire, president of the jewelry brand founded by his father Philippe Tournaire in 1973, the collaboration was an opportunity to ennoble an object he admires.
“There’s the aesthetic side of this object that has a unique design, although you see it so often you think it always existed, the technical aspect of these pens that never fail,” he said. “And it’s a pen that’s used by professors, surgeons, factory workers, executives, kids, adults. Everyone has learned to write with a Bic pen and that’s something I appreciate.”
Two years in the making, the Bic x Tournaire Alchimie also embodies the house philosophy of “selling stories, rather than selling jewelry.”
The Alchimie motif, inspired by a 30-year-old jewelry line of the brand, represents “past, present and future,” he said. “Whether it’s pens or jewelry, we make them to last and not be trendy items that end up in the bin.”
This isn’t the first time Mathieu Tournaire has played with Bic’s products. In 2012, he had created a bronze body for the writing instrument specialist’s four-color pens.
“My press officer at the time told me it wasn’t very classy to have a [plastic] pen in my pocket when meeting journalists but that I should give a Tournaire update,” he recalled.
Six years later and still in possession of his bronze-dressed pen, he met Bic chief executive Gonzalve Bich. “He loved it and we were the only two to believe that we could sell Bics that were art objects and at a certain price,” continued Tournaire. “Well, we sold plenty.”
While the “several thousands” of Bic x Tournaire four-color pens are a far cry from the more than 100,000 billion — you read that right — Bic Cristal sold since 1950, it showed how attractive the mix of industrial and artisanal was, according to Tournaire.
And for Bic, it’s about reinforcing the connection between its star product and art. “It’s a writing instrument, an instrument of expression used by many artists,” said Henri Nicolau, general manager of Bic France. “Here we are entering a dimension where we are linking industry and art to sublimate an everyday object.”
There’s also the pride of bringing together “symbols of excellence of innovation in France and around the world.” Millions of Bic Cristal continues to be produced in Marne-la-Vallée, near Paris, to be shipped around the world.
But it also felt like the kind of irreverent thinking inherited from Marcel Bich, the Italian-born French industrialist who cofounded Bic and took cues from Swiss watchmaking to industrialize the ballpoint pen on a massive scale.
“It’s a beautiful parallel with his creation of the Bic Cristal in 1950, since a ballpoint pen was almost a luxury product at the time, not something everyone could have,” said Nicolau.