Pens you choose by colour, and pens where colour is not the point

PencilDB stores a colour value for each pen. That is why a list of pens shows their colours at a glance.

Filling that field in has revealed something. Brands divide cleanly into those where it fills easily and those where it never will.

Brands that fill past 90 percent

Eboya, Pilot, Zebra, Tombow, Ohto — all above 90 percent.

The reason is simple: their own sites lay the colours out. They sell by colour, so the colour information is organised from the start.

Zebra and Tombow put around ten colours behind a single pen ([as counted in another piece](/articles/brand-part-number-ranking), roughly ten choices per product name). The colour is the product.

Brands stuck around 20 percent

Nohara Kogei sits near 20 percent, Montblanc near 30.

But the two are stuck for entirely different reasons.

A wooden barrel cannot be reduced to a colour value

You choose a Nohara pen by the name of the timber, not a colour: black persimmon, Yakusugi cedar, Brazilian rosewood, Kiso cypress.

Even within one timber, no two pieces share a figure. Grain cannot be expressed as a single colour value. Force one in and the number lies about the object.

So this is not a field that fails to fill; it is one that should not be filled. Wood workshops use the timber name as a different ruler entirely.

Montblanc simply does not sell by colour

Montblanc's situation is another matter. It carries 242 product names and 256 choices between them — 1.1 per name. Very nearly one pen per name.

Rather than lining up colour variants, it issues new pens one after another. So the colour information was never organised. That colour is not the axis of choice shows up directly in the number.

Ink colours fill even less

Ink is the interesting case: a colour is recorded for only about 30 percent.

For a product whose entire content is colour, that is lower than pen barrels.

The reason is not established. Bottle photographs make the contents hard to read, and the colour shifts with paper and nib — but that is a guess, and it stays one.

Coverage is itself a portrait of the brand

Whether the colour data is filled reflects our own progress — and equally how that brand treats colour.

For a company that sells by colour, the information assembles itself. For a company that does not, no amount of searching will produce it.

(Compiled from records in PencilDB, August 2026. Entry continues daily, so today's proportions will differ.)