Why Not Furnish Yourself With Promotional Pencils?

When you work full time in a product specific industry, you find you start to notice other related products around you more and more. In my case, I’ve noticed that I am looking a lot more closely at every promotional pen and promotional pencil that I see, triggering off various work-related thoughts in my mind. This makes it rather hard to switch off sometimes and I confess I’m becoming a bit of an anorak when it comes to personalised pens and personalised pencil designs & techniques and am building up quite a collection of the ones I see for comparison!

Talking to you as someone who works in the promotional pen industry, I find that I am very comfortable talking in industry terms and connotations, which isn’t at all surprising, especially as my business involves dealing with the trade on a daily basis. That said, it’s easy to overlook the multitude of times that I’ve experienced something on a more personal basis that has made me either laugh, smile or grit my teeth and I thought I’d share one of those examples with you today.

One of the most popular items we provide to the trade are our wide selection of promotional pencils. On a recent trip to a certain large Swedish based home store (yes, that one!), I was happily wandering around with my family, exploring the store and it’s products..as you do. It took a little while to get used to their ordering service, which involved taking a small pre-printed sheet of paper and an equally small promotional pencil with the store name on and noting down the items details to collect later on.

Hours later we finally emerged from the massive store, a few pounds lighter in pocket and a somewhat exhausted but with a slight grin on our face knowing we each had a rather nice collection of mini personalised pencils in our pockets which bore the store name and proudly boasted that we had been there. Our smug looks however, were shortlived.

A hour or so later, we finally collapsed at home and began to inspect our purchases, at which point our Son, who bore a suspiciously large grin, came in and showed us his collection of fifty three Printed pencils he had ‘borrowed’ from the store…yes 53, he had counted every single one of them! Our prized single wooden promotional pencil that we each had, suddenly looked rather unimpressive and although we did our best to put on our angry parents faces, we had to hide a smirk or two. Those printed pens are now in various pencil cases in various children’s school bags, each one taken home to an unsuspecting set of parents every night. I’m sure the store would have paid good money to reach an audience of people that wide, that quickly!

I suppose the legend of the story is that promotional pencils work in a way that we may not always expect. Their appeal goes beyond anything we could hope to target and their final destination and the number of people that view them on their journey, is a totally unknown factor. We can guarantee only the initial audience of people get to see the business logo..after that..who knows where they will end up!