Lamy pens

HISTORY of LAMY

An independent family-owned enterprise which was established in 1930 by C. Josef Lamy in Heidelberg, Lamy has made its way through years of innovation in perfecting and creating the best pens available.
Under the leadership of the present Managing Director Dr. Manfred Lamy, the company has successfully evolved as a design brand in the high-grade writing instruments sector.
Lamy stands for innovation, quality and modern design, and with its brand promise "No design writes better", expresses its clear belief in the functional design of its excellent products.
In 1966 the first products of the Lamy design era came onto the market with the Lamy 2000 writing instrument programme.
When the Lamy 2000 fountain pen arrived on the market, it took its place in the ranks of products in a new and unusual design world.
They included strange-looking office-machines from Italy, and coolly elegant electrical and audio equipment from Frankfurt.
There was a talk of a Bauhaus revival.
The first writing instrument of the new Lamy design era was created in joint project with a "free-lancer."
This was Gerd A. Müller, a man who was one of the advocates of the Bauhaus movement. This alone was enough to impel Lamy to select him to provide the company with the initial impetus for its new design style and to provide his input to it over the years. Sadly, Müller died in 1991, but his work for Lamy lives on.

Lamy 2000 was the great opportunity for a small family firm to find its individuality, its unique product profile, and to make certain that its appearance on a larger stage did not go unnoticed. This was not only due to the desire to create a contemporary product. The customers at whom Lamy aimed this writing instrument were successful, middle aged men, who were image conscious, but tended towards understatement. Lamy 2000 was also, technologically speaking, unknown territory. Never before had a clip been made of solid stainless steel - there was no precedent for this procedure, which would create an even surface of both stainless steel and plastic. In this way we created products whose almost unique character was due to the high degree of manual craftsmanship required.

Despite the intensive preparations of the Lamy sales force and the trade, despite positive survey results, no one expected that the Lamy 2000 would quickly make an impression on the market. However its permanent market penetration did increase, due to the example of the first users, and it was followed by a ball point pen, a mechanical pencil and a four-colour ball point pen. The sign of the commercial success and timelessness of this design is that these writing instruments are still being sold today, more than 30 years later. As a result, the Lamy 2000 has been included in almost every selection of German and European design and in 1984 was awarded the Busse Long life design prize.

The basis for Lamy's decision in favour of modernity as the driving force behind writing instrument design, was not a restrictive, rigid dogma. The shape of the Lamy 2000 did not establish a formal pattern - instead, it was simply the impetus for development aimed at creating the greatest variety of designs and shapes. The first variation on the theme of contemporary writing instrument design was the Lamy cp1 writing instrument of 1974, with its slim cylindrical shape and brush finished metal body which later also appeared in white and metallic lacquer as well as in matt black titanium oxide coating.

In 1980, Lamy created the Lamy Safari—a school fountain pen like no other. Attracting youths all around, Lamy ventured into the adolescent world and catered to the younger age-group.
Their wish to have their own "writing tool" specially designed for them is ideally embodied in the Lamy safari.
In the years to come, Lamy continued to modernize their techniques on creating new and sleek pens.
This led to a series of pens that were innovative and fresh such as the Lamy Spirit, Lamy Dialog 1, and the Lamy Studio.

Today, Lamy is regarded worldwide as a pioneer among the manufacturers of brand-name writing instruments. With close to 400 employees, the family enterprise develops and produces all of its products at its own factory in Heidelberg. For the nationwide business initiative "Germany - Land of Ideas", in connection with the football World Cup, Lamy has been selected as one of Germany's innovation standard-bearers.  

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