Our Mission
To provide fountain pen enthusiasts with the most personal online shopping experience through comprehensive education, exemplary service, and products we believe in.
Our Purpose
To prove that business can be personal.
Our Values
- Work Hard, Be Honest, Be Flexible
- Trust is our currency
- Work as a team
- Empower through education
- Express gratitude
- Serve with passion
- Care.
Our Values, Explained.
-
Work Hard, Be Honest, Be Flexible
When Brian Goulet was growing up, he was taught to "work hard, be honest, be flexible." Brian saw these ideals lived out by his parents, who started and ran a business at home, and naturally made them his own. In the early days of GouletPens.com, Brian and Rachel both operated under these capstones well before they were defined Goulet "company values,” and it wasn’t until more folks joined the Goulet team that it became clear that these earliest guiding principles were the company’s unofficial motto and foremost value.
This value is really a 3-in-1, and that’s intentional.
Work Hard:
We do this every day by making sure that we’re shipping orders out the door as quickly as possible, working extra hard on Mondays to catch up from weekends when we’re off. We hustle during releases of new products because we know customers will be excited to receive their shipments. We're not afraid to take on big, lofty projects to improve our site and the customer experience, and we continually disrupt ourselves to raise our own bar. Working hard is the baseline.
Be Honest:
This one’s easy – it's who we are. We're going to point out the highs and lows of the products we review because our primary focus is not simply trying to sell you something, we genuinely want you to be happy with what you buy from us. We'll admit when we’ve messed up. We'll be forthright when there are tough business decisions to make that affect your experience with us. We're not afraid to be personally accountable for the actions we take, and honesty is the foundation for building a trusting relationship with you. We're authorized dealers for all the products we carry, so you know that our products are authentic and we're bringing you quality items from reputable brands. As human beings, we think that being honest is just the right way to live, and as a company, we think honesty is just good business.
Be Flexible:
We’re a Monday-Friday office, but our website never closes. We're in the retail business with its seasonal fluctuations, new product releases, and a host of other factors that can ebb and flow the demands put on us. Things can change daily, or even hourly. We are intentional about our planning, but always remain flexible so that we can adapt to the day-to-day needs of our customers. We're also flexible with our team. We all work hard at our daily tasks within the company, but we have lives, too. Kids and pets get sick, tires go flat, life happens. We accommodate as much of this life stuff as possible, allowing for flexible schedules for our team based on their life needs.
-
Trust is our currency
This is our only “non-action oriented” company value, but we just loved the way the phrase came together. Trust is the exchange by which we operate our company. In an environment without trust, things are stressful, inefficient, uninspired, and basically everything we’re trying to avoid. By working to build trust all around our company, we truly work together as a unified team and notice that we’re able to accomplish some pretty cool things.
We put out videos of our products and are as honest and candid with the good and bad features as possible. We spend a tremendous amount of time producing each video and we share them with the community free of charge. Same goes for the website – you wouldn’t believe how much effort goes into doing our own photography, taking our own product measurements, and developing innovative tools like the Swab Shop, Pen Plaza, and Nib Nook. Could you cruise our website, watch our videos, call us, email us, hit us up on Twitter and Facebook, and still buy your stuff from someone else? Sure. But we know that by adding value to your writing experience, we are earning your trust and you will want to support our company so that we can stick around for a while and continue to serve you.
You trust that we’re being fair in our pricing, which we feel we are. You trust that we’re being honest with the information we present to you when you’re making a buying decision. You trust that we’re selling good quality products, and that we’ll be responsible in the way we pack them up so they arrive to you safely. You also trust that we’ll work quickly so you don’t have to wait any longer than necessary. If there should be any errors, you trust that we’ll always make it right.
We trust you, you trust us, and around we go. So you see how trust is our currency, exchanged between us to make for a really positive experience for everyone. Isn’t that how it should be?
-
Work as a team
The teamwork at Goulet began with just Brian and Rachel in the very first days of the company. With their diverse and complementary skills, they needed to rely on each other to get the business off the ground. This hasn’t changed one bit today, where everyone on our team is recognized and encouraged to build upon their own unique background, skills, and natural abilities. We don’t call ourselves "employees", but rather "team members", and we really mean it.
Each team member completes a personality profile to better understand ourselves and how we can all communicate effectively based on our individual styles. We have in-depth multi-stage interview processes for every position. We do daily check-in team meetings, a longer weekly company-wide meeting, and 1-on-1 weekly supervisor meetings for personal development.
Our team focus also helps you out. We do a lot of cross-training and communication, which helps us all to work together better. Additionally, if life pops up, each team member has a trained backup on their team to fill in for them. We can all shift around and still get done what needs to be done in order to serve you. We cover for each other as the work ebbs and flows so that we can keep things happening at Goulet speed. Our teamwork is something that has really defined us.
-
Empower through education
We're always looking to add value through education. Fountain pens are awesome but they're not exactly something commonly known these days. Most people have a vague sense of what a fountain pen is, but there is so much more that needs to be understood to really appreciate the experience of writing with one. Recognizing an opportunity with tools like our blog, our website, and YouTube, we aim to teach anyone who's interested in how to use fountain pens.
Our videos are a huge part of this education, though there's so much more. We have a whole team dedicated to answering emails, live chat, phone calls, direct messages, etc. All of this is done with the desire to give you a better writing experience by actually teaching you how to use your products. We invest a tremendous amount of time in training our team, learning our own products inside and out, and sharing this information with you. As we've grown in the writing industry, we also take the opportunity to educate our manufacturers about what you want, so that we can have an influence on future product offerings and design.
-
Express gratitude
In the pre-fountain pen days of GouletPens.com, we turned wood pens by hand and were barely treading water. Despite a beautiful product and a great passion for woodturning, we simply could not gain traction as a business. Once we discovered the fountain pen community and fully understood your needs, things turned around and we saw that we had a future in the fountain pen world. Call it luck, call it a blessing, call it destiny or whatever you want, but we know that we’re here doing what we do primarily because of things outside of our control, and we are grateful simply for the opportunity to do what we do every day.
In each order that leaves our shop, we include small details as our way of expressing gratitude to you as a customer for allowing us to do what we love. You will find a fun sticker featuring a design by one of our team members, as well as a card noting who packed your order, signed in their handwriting. The Goulet packages have become synonymous with the enclosed small lollipop; this sweet treat gives you something to munch on as you’re unpacking your goodies.
We buy company lunches and cool Goulet shirts for our team to wear. We give a referral bonus to any team member who finds us top-notch people to join our team. Plus, we just say "thank you" to each other, a lot. There’s an air of gratitude around the Goulet shop, and we hope it comes across in all that we do.
-
Serve with passion
Passion is the most compelling aspect that drew us into the fountain pen world. The people who are into fountain pens are really into them, and we totally get that because we’re right here with you! We went through the whole process: being a complete newbie, trying to figure out what a converter is and how to actually fill a pen from a bottle of ink, understanding different nib grinds, and what makes a $150 pen worth more than a $15 one. We've learned all the hard knocks ourselves and still discover more awesome stuff we love about these pens every day. Nearly everyone who joins our team is pretty much a pen novice, so they go through the exact same discovery process that we all have, because that experience is what sparks the passion, and what ties us to each other.
We serve you by caring about the little things. We take detailed measurements of all of our products. We closely monitor our inventory so that we're always accurately displaying what we have available for sale on our site. We develop helpful free tools for you like the Swab Shop, Nib Nook, and Pen Plaza because it’s a great service to you, and the fountain community as a whole.
We also serve others in ways that you may not expect. We help our mail carriers load up their mail trucks. We take the insights we get from you and share them with decision-makers in the brands we carry, hoping to influence what products are made and bringing you what you most desire in the pen market. But probably the coolest thing we do is Service Hours, where we pay each team member up to 40 additional hours per year to volunteer for a non-profit in a service role. Some minister to inner-city teens, some volunteer at animal shelters, others volunteer for Vacation Bible School at their local church. Whatever their personal passion, we support their service to the community.
-
Care.
This is the final value for a reason. It also is purposely punctuated. If you take out all of the other stuff, forget everything else we do, the bottom line is that we just care. We care about you and your experience with us. We care about our products. We care about the future of writing and especially writing with fountain pens. We genuinely care about each other as a team, and each of our individual aspirations and growth opportunities. We care about our future and we care about being the best version of ourselves. In everything we do, we care. Period.