Sakura is most admired for its high-end ventures its Craft Lab and lust worthy ARCHI series with its stratospheric prices. However, they also do interesting low end designs. One of the more eye catching series is from their collaboration with fashion brand BENETTON, and specifically the model BCAS300.
At just 300 yen back in the 1980s, this colorful pencil sported a clear body molded with a prismatic finish internal spiral cut. This caused the vibrant hues of the inner tube to appear ‘twisted’ optically as you rolled the pencil in your hand. Sakura chose to pair each main color with a high contrast accent for the cone, button and painted metal clip.
At first I had only seen a yellow / blue design on Twitter. Searching on Yahoo Japan Auctions and Mercari soon turned up more variants in green, blue and red. I couldn’t (and didn’t want to) catch them all. More important to me was the challenge of finding a suitable ballpoint to pair with the Sakuras.
Enter Pilot, with its just released HI-TEC-C gel roller pens in a super colorful retro edition. First released in 1994, this simple capped stick pen won Japan’s Good Design Long Life Award in 2012.
When I saw them displayed at my favorite stationery store last week, something clicked in my brain instantly and I grabbed one of each color. To be clear, the ink is still black – this limited edition simply printed a vibrant color on each refill… which is fine by me. Here is the full line up:
