The facts, the photographs, and a pen that keeps secrets.

SneakPen is an aluminium pen with a message hidden inside it — a 1.2-metre ribbon of paper, printed by a pocket thermal printer, read one line at a time through a window in the barrel.

Use it as a standfirst or a caption. It is the only description of the pen we ask you not to shorten further, because the shorter versions all end up sounding like a gadget, and it is not one.

SneakPen is a 142 mm anodised aluminium pen built around a brass twist mechanism and a 1.2-metre scroll of archival paper, visible one line at a time through a small window in the barrel. A free companion app and a pocket thermal printer, SneakPrint, turn anything you type into a ribbon you roll into the pen in about a minute — no ink, no cartridges, nothing to dry out. It comes in three finishes, Midnight, Daydream and Heirloom, and it is bought, more often than not, for somebody else.

SneakPen began with a letter that was written and never sent. The pen that came out of it is an ordinary object with an unusual habit: 142 mm and 28 g of anodised aluminium, a brass twist mechanism, a standard 0.5 mm refill, and a 1.2-metre ribbon of archival paper coiled where the ink normally hides. Twist the crown and the ribbon moves behind a window the width of a fingernail, a line at a time — long enough for a letter, short enough that you have to mean it. The words get there by way of a free companion app and SneakPrint, a pocket thermal printer that burns them onto the ribbon in seconds and hands it back warm. Three finishes — Midnight, Daydream, Heirloom — identical inside, sold direct with the printer and paper in the box. Most people buy one for someone else, and put a sentence in it they have never managed to say out loud.

Around 120 words. If you need a 50-word or a 250-word version for a particular slot, ask and we will write it rather than let you cut it badly.

The short history, and the only dates we give publicly:

• 2021 — a letter written to someone whose address had already been lost, carried folded in a coat pocket until the creases wore through.
• 2022 — the first paper scroll fits inside a pen barrel. The prototype is a hollowed-out biro and a strip of receipt paper, and it jams constantly.
• 2023 — the first hundred pens, filled by hand.
• 2024 — SneakPrint, so that anyone can print their own scroll instead of writing to us for one.

The founder is Rayan, who still answers the shop's email. We are a small direct-to-customer business; we do not publish headcount, funding or sales figures, and we would rather say that plainly than let a round number get invented in the gap.

Written SneakPen: one word, capital S, capital P, no space and no hyphen. Not Sneak Pen, not Sneakpen, not SNEAKPEN except in a headline set in capitals anyway.

The pocket printer is SneakPrint, on the same pattern. The companion app is the SneakPen app in running copy. The finishes are Midnight, Daydream and Heirloom, capitalised.

The company behind it is [Company name]. In consumer copy, SneakPen on its own is right; the legal name is only needed where you are naming the trading entity.

You may use the logo to illustrate a piece about us, in print or online, in either the dark or the light version, without asking.

What we ask you not to do:

• Redraw, recolour, outline, add a gradient to, or apply an effect to it.
• Stretch or squash it. Scale it proportionally or not at all.
• Rotate it, set it at an angle, or lock it up with another logo as though we were partners.
• Put it on a busy photograph, or on a background that leaves it hard to read.
• Use it as your own icon, favicon, avatar, or the artwork for a piece that is not about us.

Leave clear space around it of roughly the height of the letterform, and do not set it smaller than it can be read at. Files come in the press pack — ask through the form below.

Our product photographs may be used, unaltered, to illustrate editorial coverage: reviews, features, gift guides, newsletters and broadcast. No fee, no expiry, no need to check back with us first.

Please do not:

• Cut the pen out and drop it into a different scene, or replace the background.
• Composite, retouch or generate variations of our images, or use them to train or prompt an image model.
• Add a caption or an overlay that changes what the picture is saying about the product.
• Use them in paid advertising, on packaging, or on merchandise.

Colour correction for your print process is fine, and cropping for a format is fine as long as the object is not misrepresented. Credit reads SneakPen, or the photographer's name where we have supplied one.

Photographs of the pen taken by you, in your own studio, are entirely yours. We would love to see them, and we will not ask to use them without permission.

Ask through the form at the bottom of this page, or email [Press email], and we send a download link — usually the same working day.

Tell us what your layout actually needs and we will send what fits rather than everything we have: the orientation, whether you want the pen on a plain or a styled background, which finish, portrait or landscape, and whether you need the printer and the scroll in shot. If we do not have the picture you are describing, we will say so rather than send you a near miss.

Everything in the pack is captioned with the finish and the photographer, so nothing has to be guessed at on the desk.

We send samples for a named commission. Tell us the outlet, roughly when it runs, and which finish suits the piece — Daydream photographs best, Midnight looks like nothing at all in the hand, which is rather the point.

The sample arrives as a customer's would: the pen, the SneakPrint printer, the paper, the box. It is yours to keep, and there is nothing to send back.

What comes with it, in writing:

• No approval over your copy. We do not ask to see the piece before it runs.
• No conditions, no embargo unless we have agreed one with you, and no expectation of coverage.
• No payment for coverage, ever — not to journalists, not to publications, not to anyone.

Disclose the sample however your outlet's rules require. We will never ask you not to.

Send us a fact to check and we will confirm it, correct it, or tell you we cannot confirm it. We will not stall, and we will not answer a fact-check with marketing copy.

If something we told you turns out to be wrong, we will say so quickly and in writing, and we will not ask you to take a piece down over it. If a published piece has a factual error, [Press email] is the fastest route to a correction — a line, an amount, a material.

So that nobody has to estimate on our behalf, here is what we do not publish:

• Sales figures, units shipped, revenue, headcount and funding.
• The name and location of our manufacturing partners.
• A carbon footprint, a recycled-content percentage, or any environmental certification — we hold none and have measured none, and the reasoning is set out on the materials page.
• Anything about a product that is not on sale yet.

Ask anyway. The answer will be a yes or a plain no, and a no will never be dressed up as an approximate figure.