73 PROFILE On point Rob Harradine, Head of Sales and Marketing of Mistubishi Pencil Co, UK, chats to Craft Focus about the company’s environmental responsibilities and the fabulous POSCA writing range! Tell us a little bit about the company. Where are you based? When did the company start? At Mitsubishi Pencil Company, owner of POSCA and Uni-ball, we pride ourselves on producing reliable, worldleading writing and drawing pens that perform all day, every day, whatever the task. Founded in Tokyo, 1878, our pioneering spirit ensures we combine quality, innovation and design to deliver an exceptional writing experience every time. Our UK headquarters is based in Milton Keynes and we devote that same care, diligence and attention to our office management, delivery and customer service as we do our products. How has the company evolved? Retail is forever changing and we have to be agile in order to fully support and provide solutions for our customers. Over the years, we’ve become increasingly aware of the need to support our customers with additional tools to help sell their products. It’s not enough to supply products and eye-catching display stands − that’s a given. We also we need to provide added value with events, projects and social media assets. We’ve also focused on our environmental responsibilities. It’s not simply about selling pens anymore, we need to provide more sustainable solutions where we can. There’s always more work to be done but we’re confident that over the past couple of years we’ve been making steps in the right direction. Whether it’s providing an energy efficient, modern environment for our staff to work in, reducing single-use plastic packaging, designing products made with sustainable material or donating a percentage of our product sales to charity. We’re always thinking carefully about the impact we have on the world and how we can look after it for future generations. In summer 2019, we launched our plastic free packaging (PFP) on our key writing pen ranges. Since introducing PFP we expanded our product offering and have seen a massive reduction in plastic, with 3395kg less plastic packaging used during 2020 – a reduction of around 77 per cent. As well as reducing the consumption of single-use plastics, our PFP has another environmental advantage. PFP is slimmer, so you can fit more product in the same amount of space. The result? Saving 30 per cent space on average, this means fewer deliveries are needed. It’s a smart solution for transportation. We’ve also worked on reducing the environmental impact of our packing processes too. What do you specialise in? We specialise in great quality writing pens and excellent creative pens such as POSCA
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