Pen refills - some brands are hard to find

A Google search for Schneider topball refills will, incredibly, show up only something like only 8 suppliers in the whole of the UK. If you know your exact pen model and make your search even more specific (e.g. search for Schneider Topball 850 rollerball Refill), it only shows 2 different UK suppliers! Add in quotes around that search phrase (so as to force the search engine to search for sites containing exactly that phrase) and, at time of writing, only one site pops up in the results. Quite incredible. www.pensfromheaven.com seems to have a very nice pen refills niche!

Bear in mind that Schneider is one of Europe's most popular brands and you really have to ask yourself how come they're so sparsely represented on the web. The answer lies in the fact that, while big in the rest of Europe (and certainly growing nicely in the US), they have only been represented in the UK in very recent years and, it seems, writing instrument retailers are a little slow to catch on. But not so with pensfromheaven.com ...

Let's try another make on Google, this time for a Pelikan pen refill: type in "Level L5 refill" and, again, it's www.pensfromheaven.com who are the ONLY result in the whole of the UK. And a search for (incl. quotes) "Porsche Design Ballpen refill" turns up the same result. Did I mention the phrase, "nice niche"?

So, what other difficult (and easy) to find pen refills do they sell? Just about any Caran d'Ache refills, Faber-Castell and Graf von Faber-Castell refills, Pelikan refills, Porsche Design, Schneider and Tombow writing instrument refills. So, if you're having trouble locating that illusive refill for your favourite writing instrument, you know where to look first.

Hey, by the way, in case any of you from across the pond spotted it, 'refil' is spellt 'refill' here in the UK; it's no mistake ;-)