Would you pay $180 for a new type of writing instrument? Image via The New York Times On a crisp fall morning in late October 1945, approximately 5,000 shoppers rushed the 32 nd street Gimbel’s ...

In the autumn of 1948, Marcel Bich, owner of a company located north of Paris that produced ink cartridges for fountain pens, pushed a wheelbarrow in his garden in the village of Rhuis. He considered ...

It would leak all over,” Bic CEO Gonzalve Bich, Marcel’s grandson, told Barron’s editor at large Andy Serwer when recounting the company’s founding in an interview for the At Barron’s video series.

It seemed like an innocuous question: “Why can’t China make a good ballpoint pen?” But it carried a much deeper meaning thanks to the man who asked it: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. At a seminar in ...