Back to School season often brings new pens to the store shelf. While Sharpie’s newest entrant, the S-Gel, has been around for months, only over the summer did we seem them infiltrate the stationery world at scale.
I grabbed a 4-pack of 0.7 mm pens from Amazon (two black gel, one each of blue and red,) to test, but if my grocery store shelves are any indication, you should be able to easily find them in the 0.5 mm and 1.0 mm tip sizes as well. Sharpie’s new Roller is also available as part of the big push we are seeing from the brand.
As many of us pen addicts already know, and as Sharpie is about to find out, the long-time stalwarts of the gel pen section of the store occupy that space for a reason. The Pilot G2, Uni-ball Signo, and Pentel EnerGel are household names, so Sharpie has their work cut out if they want to displace any or all of that trio.
So how does the Sharpie S-Gel stack up against some of the best gel ink pens of the past decade? Not very well.
The worst thing a pen can be is inconsistent, and that is what I am getting from this batch of pens. The black 0.7 mm is especially poor, with a nose cone I can feel scratching the page as the tip rolls across it. This makes for a scratchy, wide line, and a poor experience.
The blue gel pen is the antithesis of the black. In fact it is quite good and reminds me of the Pilot G2, which is a good experience to shoot for. The red gel pen is close to the blue - a little more scratchy, but nowhere as bad as the black.
With the variance I am seeing between the three colors and how they feel on the page, I would be hesitant to recommend these over any of the three excellent choices I mentioned above.
Being under the Sharpie umbrella gives these pens a leg up in marketing, but the performance isn’t there. I think the style is lacking a bit as well. I understand that making a great $2 gel ink pen at scale is difficult, but how about letting loose a little bit?
Sharpie doesn’t hesitate to do that with their permanent marker lineup. How about bringing some of that aesthetic into the gel pen world, instead of designing a pen that looks like every other pen it is competing against? Or maybe design something completely different and off the wall. We already have what they are trying to sell us, and better versions at that.
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