Dive is back in stock (at $99 USD now)

Yep. I have it linked. Just went there and…

Unreal. What a sh*t show. Uni has really screwed up on this. I’m so disgusted, I refuse to buy from them. I’ll pick up a Dive a couple years from now on the used market for a decent price.

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Tokyo Pen Shop has (had) them for $83 yesterday. Interesting price. Anyone know why that price?

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south-park-its-gone

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I’ve seen a lot of resalers selling at sub $100 USD prices, it’s a little strange. I’d imagine overstock from the scalpers and they realized they can now be the first target for buyers and be under uni’s exorbitant pricing

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This doesn’t make sense.

I emailed The Uni about the Dive being out of stock. The reply is puzzling.
They more than double the price to hedge resellers, and now tell us to buy them from the resellers

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It makes sense, and doesn’t make sense at the same time.

It makes sense that if they try to hedge resellers and they get bullied by the community, they just retire the product.

It makes no sense that a company that had taken such magnificent marketing decisions in the Japanese release is now messing it up so hard overseas.

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I think the customer service people are not sufficiently informed to deal with the Dive situation.

I really do not believe it’s a “limited-time” product after all they invested in making it. If there were very expensive complications involved, then after the first run of limited, they’d have had another batch marked as limited, also at the limited price. The fact they made it at $40 USD in the USA and were selling for 5500 JPY in Asia… meant they were prepared for regular production.

But perhaps there are issues that haven’t been disclosed publicly? Maybe there are some complications in production they couldn’t foresee that are making it cumbersome to keep up with demand? Given the demand, it makes no sense to me that they’d not work to solve any production problems interfering.

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Agreed – especially after they have 8 years of R&D in this product (as pointed out by you and others).
Seems like they trying to devise a perceived scarcity in the US market to justify the price increase?

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I’m pretty sure that they’re not actually discontinuing the thing. I meant that they’re retiring the listing and stopping direct overseas sales.

I think that the customer support person is just a bit incompetent in their wording.

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$95 on Aliexpress, orange, green and blue. Free shipping.

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Ah yes the dive has been on taobao since the non limited model released. I didn’t know about it being on AliExpress as well

If you had to speculate, why do you think they are not selling it in America but are selling it for $60 in Japan? Seems like they have closed themselves off to a very large market.

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You’re looking at the entire American market :joy:

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This is absolutely ridiculous, that’s a 150% price increase. It’s not even worth it at that price.

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Uniball Co really screwed up in their product marketing department. This was such a bread-winner model. Highly anticipated. And sure, they did their initial cream skimming with the limited edition blue model. But then, finally released for production… and they seem to have made insufficient inventory to handle it, as well as weak safeguards against scalper hoarding.

Once the dust settles down, this pencil should be selling for $40 ~ $50 USD brand new. That’s what they originally aimed to do. Right now the “Dive Fever” is still high. But it will wane. Interest will trickle down. And so will prices. I’m in no great hurry to get this pencil. Uniball invested way too much into this pencil to just drop it all of the sudden. I expect it will be made for at least 5 years, possibly up to 10 if there’s enough of a customer base willing to jump from a $20 Kuru Toga Advance to a $50 Dive.

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Purple Dive :sunglasses:

Someone on the MP subreddit said they saw this on the Uni instagram account.

https://reddit.com/r/mechanicalpencils/s/5j1MQndFFQ

Edit: can someone please translate what’s on the subreddit? For some reason my browser isn’t

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Thanks. That was weird (of my phone).

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Still can’t buy them in the US. So weird.

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If this is a limited edition color then they are feeding right back into the issue with resellers. :man_facepalming:

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