A Ritttter pen might be found anywhere

Ritter Pen, a German company with offices in Fort Myers,

Jacob Ritter

makes pens for businesses in 80 countries with thousands of distributors all over the world. You know the pen advertising a brand of medicine at the doctor's office? Or the one the cell-phone company salesclerk asked you to sign the credit card receipt with? That may very well have been a Ritter pen.

A large production facility in Germany and smaller ones in Poland, China, the Czech Republic, Brazil and in Fort Myers, produce 120 to 130 million pens per year, said company director Arno Ritter. The company's top sales are in Europe. (The U.S., Ritter said, is only his third or fourth largest customer).

The Fort Myers division of Ritter - that makes promotional items, mostly pens since the late 1940s and wooden boxes before that - is in a medium-sized warehouse off Luckett Road on Country Lakes Drive.

There's little there except business fronts, and the area is bordered by underdeveloped land on one side and Ortiz Avenue where it cuts through a low income area of East Fort Myers on the other side. Inside the building: a salesperson, offices, a small storeroom, two men manning a machine which stamps pens with logos, and three women assembling pen parts. The pens ship out via UPS or Federal Express, not on semi-trucks.

"Our products are small, so it's not really an issue," Ritter said.

The company came to Fort Myers in the 1980s, when it began to make sales in America. Before that, the family business progressed from manufacturing wooden boxes - which founder Jacob Ritter sold beginning in 1928 to, for example, the car manufacturer Opel and companies that sold bottled water.

Today, its business is plastics.

"And how it came to pens, I can't really say," Ritter said.

Just that pens developed in popularity in the 1940s and 50s - that's when the ball point pen was finally developed successfully - and they sold well in Germany. (An American leather tanner named John Loud patented the first roller-ball-tip pen in 1888, made to mark leather hides, but the pen was never mass produced.)

When new technology called "plastic mold injection" allowed Ritter to mass produce the pens, that's the direction the company took. He described, simply, what his $600,000 machines in Germany do: "You have a piece of plastic. You make it round. You put a hole in it. And then you can get a refill and write with it."

Each plastic part of the pen - the barrel, the tip, the pocket clip - comes out of the machines, which produce them in any desired color, and the parts are assembled by hand.

The goal, Ritter said, is precision: smooth writing housed in a sturdy plastic pen designed with the colors and logos of your choice, and quickly delivered to anywhere in the world. "This is what counts in the market."

In retrospect, he said choosing a large city in the Northeast or the Midwest to represent his U.S. interests might have been more sensible, strategically. But he likes Southwest Florida.

"It's a very nice area," he said. "Besides business, we love to come here from time to time."

Ritter has two daughters, two and six, who enjoy Florida's sun and seashore with him. He also likes to fly - if he wasn't a pen manufacturer, Ritter said he might be a pilot. He still takes his small, private plane tooling around the skies of America and abroad. And if he wasn't a pilot, he might be a lawyer, a profession he spent a few years studying. But ultimately, the family business beckoned.

"It was never really a question," Ritter said. "I like what I do, even if it was different than I thought it would be."

Meanwhile, Ritter plans to keep his companies U.S. location in Fort Myers. "This area has developed. I've been watching this now for 10 years. Even with the real estate bubble bursting, building is going on; (the area) is developing very fast."

And the weak economy hasn't hurt the company much.

"It's not like the stock market, thank God," Ritter said. "The U.S. was a little lower (in sales) but we have phone calls, the people are closing (making sales). Because we deal with the U.S. as a whole the weak market doesn't affect us as much."

Operations manager Eric Flecha added, "The worldwide market is still strong. When you have a worldwide market it helps alleviate weak economies in other parts of the world."

Having the world as its market also means a Ritter pen might pop up anywhere. Ritter is delighted when this happens, like when a Lufthansa airlines employee provided him with one to fill out a form; or three months ago in Germany, when he went to pick up a map for flying, and paid with a credit card. The cashier handed him the card back and said, "Hey, Mr. Ritter, you have to sign here," and, unexpectedly, handed him a familiar pen.

"It's a nice feeling," he said.