Write On! – Why We Use Reviewers

In March of 2021, we published this article on our Karas Kustoms Blog, and we thought now would be a good time to repost it and add an update. We've been highlighting reviews of the basik.001 rollerball, and some questions about reviews and reviewers have come up which is why we've made this decision sooner rather than later.

Original Article - 3/1/21

We get asked why we provide pen samples to reviewers quite a bit. It’s one of the top questions we get right behind “Are you going to use titanium any time soon?” and “How can I become a reviewer?”. To my knowledge, it’s not a question we’ve answered before. Let's get into it.

The simplest answer to this question is that when we went out on a limb with the design and release of the Render K pen, we had no “clout” in the pen community. Karas Kustoms was a nobody in the realm of writing instruments, but we had started building relationships in the Everyday Carry community on several forums that catered to the watch/knife/backpack/etc. collector crowd. Several people that were active in these communities had started or would go on to start “pen blogs”, so our relationships with these people were made relatively early on in both our journey and in their journeys. It was mutually beneficial for us to send samples to these bloggers and reviewers because it helped grow our brand and helped them establish themselves in an industry that was in its infancy.

People can and do have all kinds of feelings about “professional product reviewers”. Distrust and even animosity are commonplace when it comes to how people view pen reviewers. As time has gone on the line between unbiased-person-reviewing-a-pen and reviewer-that-receives-paid-sponsorships-from-pen-companies has been blurred quite a bit. We take all of that into account when we are approached by a reviewer asking us to provide sample pens, when we’re approached by a reviewer asking us to advertise on their platform, or when we approach a pen reviewer and ask them if they'd like to review our product.

The fact is our product reaches a limited number of eyeballs organically or via our marketing platforms. Providing sample pens to reviewers that have small, medium, or large audiences expands our reach but also continues to lend our brand credence in a niche but growing market. It’s a strategic decision on our part to engage, not only with the community at large but with a select group of people that have been appointed leading voices of the pen community.

I can’t comment on how other companies interact with these reviewers and what they ask or demand the reviewers write or don’t write about their product. I can honestly say we are extremely upfront about our desire that the review is completely free of pressure and bias from our company. We’ll provide product and company background information along with the item, but we like to stay as hands-off as we can during the process. If the reviewer has specific information they want or need, we’ll provide them the information if we’re able to, but we don’t ever want to be accused of influencing a review. I’m very careful to stress that there are no requirements being placed on the reviewer in their receipt of product from us. We don’t expect a review, but we’re hopeful of one, and we rely on the quality of our product to influence the final outcome of the review itself.

This has led us to a point where we feel we have really good relationships with a large majority of the reviewers that are active both as bloggers and vloggers. We value these relationships and just as much as we love the chance to have our product be featured to their audiences, we enjoy supporting these people that helped us on our journey as a pen manufacturer. To say it’s a symbiotic relationship removes the friendship and emotions aspect from the equation. It’s similar to our dedication to working with other small manufacturers like Rickshaw Bagworks, Jonathon Brooks, Turner’s Workshop, and many others. As big as the pen community has grown, it’s still pretty small and tight-knit. It’s still a lot more like a family than a fandom in some aspects, and this is one of those aspects.

A decade after we made our first pen, we're at a completely different spot as a pen manufacturer and retail brand. It's not as vital that we have interaction with pen people everywhere they gather. We'd love to be able to get featured on every blog, vlog, magazine, podcast, and other outlets that talk about pens. We also understand that just isn't a reality. We're REALLY busy and while we make time to hit up virtual pen meet-ups, podcasts, and blogs we can't be everywhere. But we value the friendships and relationships we have with a handful of pen reviewers, and we'll offer them products when they ask or when we release something we feel they'd enjoy featuring. We feel that these relationships mean too much to us as people to simply abandon them, and that's why we continue to send products to pen reviewers.

Update - 5/11/25

The pen reviewer world has changed a lot since we published that blog post, and far more bloggers and vloggers have left the space than have come into the space. We're still in contact with many of those people, and on good terms with them, but life moves on and many of those reviewers were doing all of their reviews in their spare time with their own money. Some of the biggest names are still around, like The Pen Addict and Well-Appointed Desk. They've expanded, adding guest reviewers to spread the work and lessen the individual workload; a smart move that has allowed for consistency in posting schedule and a variety of voices. It was an eye opener when I pulled up my spreadsheet of Pen Reviewers this past February and found out it had shrunk from nearly thirty to just over ten active reviewers. There has been an expansion into other social media platforms like Tik Tok, but nearly every single one of the reviewers we approached on Tik Tok only accepted items if they were receiving payment for their review. That is completely antithetical to our stance and relationship with reviewers.

That's the biggest takeaway from this latest round of pens we sent out to reviewers. That we were still adamant about getting brutally honest feedback about the basik. Our personal opinions on the product aside, we just wanted those reviewers to give us their honest thoughts, don't hold back anything, we can take it. We enjoy reading good reviews that validate our ideas, designs, and products. But we learn more from constructive criticism and feedback from Pen Reviewers. Some universal feedback we received that we should have taken more seriously was around the Reaktor Line. Almost all of the reviewers commented on how confusing everything was. The whole product like was the Reaktor, but there was the Galaxie and Galaxie XL and Starliner and Starliner XL. The Galaxie was a clipless, tiny capped pocket ballpoint pen while the Galaxie XL was a capped rollerball pen with a clip. Likewise the Starliner was a clipless, tiny capped fountain pen, and the Starliner XL was a capped fountain pen with a clip. The internal naming kind of made sense, referencing mid-century automobiles which in turn referenced the Space Race, but it was extremely convoluted and confusing. In hindsight, we totally agree. We've continued to look at that brand and those pens as a missed opportunity. The ideas around a snap-cap pen were used in the Vertex with great success, but the Reaktor Line suffered from a variety of reasons, but the biggest one was an attempt to capture so many different customers, we lost focus and the product was not to our high standard plus the marketing was just as confusing.

That type of feedback from reviewers is extremely important to us. We can't replicate the lens a reviewers uses when analyzing our product. As unbiased as we are and as frequently as we play devil's advocate when prototyping or designing products, we're never truly unbiased. Reviewers and the partnerships we have with them provide information about our brand and our products that we've come to view as invaluable to our processes. Hopefully, we'll see some new faces enter the pen review community and start to build up a following. There's always room for people who have thoughtful, informed opinions and feedback. Knowledge is another powerful tool in our library, and reviewers are sources of knowledge that add to that library. We might not use them as much as we did in the past, but we value their input even more now than we did when we started this journey.