Same Workshop, Same Brass, Different Verdict
It ships with sandpaper so you can rub the lacquer off yourself. The only reviewer we found called it their least interesting design.
Did not pass
We already recommend an Ystudio pen. The Classic Revolve Ballpoint in raw brass scored 8.0. Six verified reviews on JetPens. Golden Pin Design Award. Taiwan Presidential Office commissions. It passed.
This is the other one. Same Taiwanese workshop. Same solid brass underneath. But the Portable Ballpoint adds a matte black lacquer coating, a leather necklace, and a brass shackle. It costs $100, matching the brass version.
It won Best Design of The Year 2018 from Taiwan’s Shopping Design Awards.
We scored it 7.80. We needed 8.0.
What Separated Them
Trust. The raw brass version has six verified buyer reviews on JetPens and coverage from The Pen Addict, The Clicky Post, and The Gentleman Stationer. Not a lot, but enough for our system to cross-reference claims against real buyers.
The Portable Ballpoint has zero customer reviews on any platform we could find. Not on the brand’s own site (which has no review system). Not on JetPens. Not on Amazon, where it isn’t sold. Not on Goulet Pens, which doesn’t carry it.
The only product-level review comes from Brad Dowdy at The Pen Addict, published November 2018.
He liked it. Sort of. “Is this a good pen? Yes. Would it make a good gift? Yes. Would I recommend it? Maybe. Would I choose it over any other ystudio pen? No.”
He called it “ystudio’s least interesting and least useful design.” He found that the necklace and shackle accessories, meant to make the pen portable, actually made it harder to use. “If anything, this is a desk pen or pen case carry pen.”
One mixed-positive editorial review and thirteen brand-level editorial sources gave us a confidence score of 60 out of 100. That translates to a trust score of 6.0.
The raw brass version earned 8.0 for trust. That gap, 2.0 points at a 15% weight, accounts for 0.30 of the 0.70 difference between the two scores.
The Evidence We Did Find
This pen’s credentials are not in question. Ystudio was founded in Taiwan in 2012. The brand now sells through more than 300 stockists in 37 countries, including Paul Smith and the Guggenheim Museum Shop.
The Portable Ballpoint specifically won Best Design of The Year 2018 from Shopping Design, one of Taiwan’s major design publications. The brand has earned Golden Pin Design Awards in 2017, 2019, and 2024.
The pen ships in a box with a strip of sandpaper. That is not a defect. You use it to remove the black lacquer from the brass body, creating a patina pattern unique to you. Ystudio calls this “brassing.”
The concept drew us to the product in the first place. A pen that arrives with the tools for its own transformation is a genuine WOW moment.
We scored WOW at 9. That is one of the higher WOW scores in our system. The pen is stocked at Guggenheim and Paul Smith but absent from Amazon bestseller lists. It lives in the design world but not the mainstream.
For a gift, that gap is the entire point.
Where the Math Fell Short
GLOW scored 7. The matte black lacquer is handsome in person but photographs flat. Product images show a dark cylinder. The brass edges that catch light at each corner of the hexagonal body are subtle in photos.
The raw brass version, by contrast, glows in every image.
MOMENT scored 8. The 31-gram brass body has genuine heft for its size. The twist mechanism is satisfying. The sandpaper moment is unlike anything in our database.
The full calculation: (7 × 0.25) + (9 × 0.35) + (8 × 0.25) + (6.0 × 0.15) = 7.80.
What Would Change
Verified buyer reviews.
That is the system’s primary gap. The pen has editorial validation, award validation, and retail validation across hundreds of stockists. What it lacks is a verifiable record of people who bought it and wrote about the experience.
More reviews across multiple platforms would shift the confidence score, which would raise the trust score, which would close the 0.20-point gap.
The irony is not lost on us. This pen probably sits on desks in 37 countries. The people using it just haven’t reviewed it.
We wanted to feature this pen. The sandpaper-in-the-box story is one of the best we’ve encountered. But our system requires evidence we couldn’t find, and “probably excellent” is not the same as “verified.” The Ystudio workshop in Taiwan makes pens we can verify. One of them is already on our site.
