About PALMVEX
The thing that started it all
One day I was watching pen spinning videos.
The technique style had been drifting toward something that looked a lot like devil sticks and contact staff — slow, deliberate, heavy rotations. Beautiful.
Then I looked at the props people were using. A stick with no grip. No particular weight distribution. Something that looked exactly like a pen.
I kept asking myself: why hasn't anyone made a small finger contact staff?
That question became the Finger Staff. That question became this store.
Who I am
My name is Ian Jenson.
I started spinning pens in 2008. This matters not because pen spinning is the point, but because of what it taught me: in the old school community, you made your own pens. You modified them, weighted them, wrapped them. The prop was something you built, not just something you bought. That relationship — between maker and object — is something I've never been able to let go of.
I've been a contact juggler since 2010. I won the WPSA world pen spinning championship in 2019. I brought the fishtail into pen spinning. Some people know me from Kuma Films — "Contact Juggling Taiwan" was one of the videos that put that channel on the map, and "Epic Penspinning" was the first video on the channel to break ten million views. In 2024, I won the Japan Crystal Ball National Championship.
I've performed at Wuzhen Theatre Festival, at the Sony PS5 launch. I've performed in Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia. I've judged more competitions than I can remember.
I say all of this not to impress you, but to explain what I believe about props — and why I'm qualified to have an opinion.
Contact Ball Cup 2024
Free Division Champion · Japan
What I actually believe
Humans did not invent techniques and then design props to execute them.
It happened the other way around.
Someone picked up a kendama. In the early days, the game centered on fundamental tricks — catching the ball on the cups, spiking it on the tip. Then someone started throwing the ball higher. Then someone threw the ken itself into the air — and caught it.
A technique nobody had planned for was born from a toy that was never designed for it. They called it ”juggle“.
A manufacturer once made a large, soft ring, forty centimeters across. I saw it and thought: what is this garbage? Then I watched a Spanish juggler — Gon Fernández — fold it in half — and an entirely new movement language appeared.
The object comes first. The technique follows.
This is what I believe. And this belief is in direct conflict with what has been happening to the prop market.
Clubs from different brands are starting to look identical. Major prop manufacturers are converging on the same components. The market is standardising. And when everything becomes standard, everyone starts doing the same things.
I love many of these props. But standardisation is the enemy of discovery.
Why I make things
I don't make things because I think the market is wrong.
I make things because I want to put into human hands the version of an object the market hasn't made yet — and see what happens.
The Finger Staff has grip — because pen spinning technique increasingly resembles contact staff, yet somehow in all these years, nobody thought to add grip. Why does the thing you spin between your fingers have to look like a pen?
The Triple Staff is weighted heavy at both ends, light in the middle — the same logic as a precision pen mod. The gradient colour along the shaft is there for a reason too: when the staff is airborne during a toss, the colour shift lets you read the rotation at a glance, confirming exactly how many times it has turned before you catch it. A detail that changes how you train.
The Crystal Baton is fully transparent — because contact juggling's visual magic comes from the convex lens refraction of a crystal-clear sphere. A tinted or opaque baton loses the isolation effect entirely. And at the centre of each baton, a textured rubber grip ring — something no other isolation stick on the market has. One precise contact point for your fingers, invisible against the clear shaft. Why had nobody done this before?
Most of my experiments fail. I am, by any reasonable measure, a terrible business owner — I can't stop spending earnings on materials for new ideas, most of which end up in a drawer. But the ones that don't are here.
What Palmvex is
This store is not a statement that existing props are bad.
It is a statement that the right version of many props hasn't been made yet. That when you find that version — the one with grip, the one that's fully transparent, the one whose colour tells you something — and put it into human hands, techniques nobody has planned for start to appear. That the beautiful, chaotic, accidental way juggling actually evolves — plural, surprising, occasionally clumsy — is worth protecting.
I've been doing this long enough to know that I don't know what will happen when you pick up one of these props.
That's exactly why I made them.
— Ian Jenson