I've been buying from Goulet for years, but lately their service has taken a major nosedive. I recommend people stay away from them now.
The last pen I received from them was broken. They would not take it back, asked me to deal with the manufacturer directly. Horrible customer service. After so many expensive pens (Pelikan, Pilot and Visconti), I won't be buying from them again.
Potential buyers should also be aware the fountain pen community on Reddit has soured massively on Goulet.
In addition to deteriorating service and slow shipping concerns compared to alternatives, there’s a view that purchasing from the company directly funds anti-LGBTQ owners and organizations. The owners cofounded a branch of a church whose pastor made wildly anti-LGBTQ remarks. The response to the controversy was not well handled by the Goulets (essentially radio silence then an highly misleading statement). The controversy came around the same time a well beloved podcast employee Drew was fired.
There was also the prior controversy with Noodler’s Inks and the Gaulet’s rehabilitating him after anti-Semitic imagery was placed for a second time on his bottles.
Because so much of the original megathread was deleted (whole lot of subreddit moderation drama occurred because of this incident) I’m linking a later summary for those curious.
If the business is going downhill then that's one thing. I wouldn't know; I am not in the habit of asking retailers to price-match a 33% discount and it was an impulse buy in any case, so it's been a couple years since I ordered a pen from Brian. If his company disappoints me, of course I will say so.
Beliefs in public are another matter in the United States, where I have spent my life a citizen. It is for like cause my privilege to take this rather childish campaign of character assassination exactly as seriously as it deserves.
Oh sure, the SBC has been industriously covering a Catholic-grade child sex abuse scandal since some time early last year. But the SBC also by design, being effectively a 501(c) something-or-other front and to my view encompassed by RICO, isn't really capable of responding; the appropriately equipped organizations would be the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Absent their involvement, and even in light of their present and ongoing compromise, am I meant to imagine Reddit is better in this regard? Good grief, that place has been as bad as the worst you hear of Discord now, and nothing out of Reddit's ownership or the regulatory environment suggests meaningful intent to do better.
But what do I know? I'm just a dumb old redneck homo who came out of Mississippi, 'trade' being one term I have heard along the way. Of course it's the just role of the fancy folk with leisure for literacy, like you, to instruct my brute if decent kind of our proper role in things. You know, like your intellectual forebears, the antebellum Southern planters who so cozened my own poor ancestors and maintained them in their useful ignorance. I like to hope we're a little more clever this generation. Or more continent in where we place our trust, at least.
It was a Visconti Opera Master. Comes with a power reservoir filler that detached from the nib assembly within five days of purchase. Turned out the threads were completely mismatched, that pen should have never been sold. Now, granted Visconti has serious QC issues, but this was a limited edition and not only did Goulet fail to catch the issue during testing but they also refused to do anything about it except refer me to the manufacturer.
I ended up fixing the pen myself. It works well now, but after that experience, I am done with Goulet.
Eh, it's a thousand-dollar Italian statement pen. If the guy doesn't really want to run a Lambo dealership, I get it, and I can see where you might be annoyed to have helped find that out. For those of us with less rarefied tastes, I think things are probably pretty different on a lot of axes, but all it takes to spend money is money.
As I said nearby [1], when I had Decimo trouble, he not only got hold of Pilot to find out they don't sell an OEM o-ring, but after that spent the day back and forth with me via email, making and giving accurate measurements of an intact part, all kinds of things. The end result is still the first pen I reach for all day, every day. I don't know what was really so different between your case and mine, but I doubt it had that much to do with Brian.
The last pen I received from them was broken. They would not take it back, asked me to deal with the manufacturer directly. Horrible customer service. After so many expensive pens (Pelikan, Pilot and Visconti), I won't be buying from them again.