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Photo of the day: Pen Pocket

October 28, 2011 by 5 Comments

All men carry pens, right? But putting a pen in your pants pocket can be a bit of a pain — it rolls around with your keys, sticks out to one side, the cap tears at the pocket lining.

Sitting next to my friend Nik Agharkar at a dinner party, I noticed him reach inside his suit jacket to grab a pen when the bill came. And that’s when I saw it: the pen pocket.

Forgive me if this is incredibly common and I’m just late to the game. I’m not a man, I don’t own men’s suits, and I don’t have a tendency to look inside many men’s suit jackets. Or perhaps I just don’t know many men who wear bespoke suits. Nik’s suit by Custom Men has this ingenius feature and I just had to snap a pic.

I poked around and found other examples of this:

Peyman Umay:

“Pen pocket is a simple and practical addition to your suit. This is a must have customization option for business men. Pulling a high class pen from a pen pocket to sign an important deal is a great way to display a personalized lining color and to subtly insinuate that you own a bespoke suit.”

A Suit that Fits:

“No more fumbling around in your pocket trying to get a grasp of your Mont Blank (or 4 bic); our fantastic New Product Development whizz, Mighel Critten, has launched a REALLY cool attribute that’ll be put into all our suits for this moment onwards! On the inside of the jacket, next to the pocket, is a small slot specifically designed to hold a pen. This extra feature will now come with every suit purchased from ASuitThatFits.com.”

But of course, this feature is conditional for two user groups: right-handed or left?

Wistful Writer:

“I was thoroughly satisfied, save for the fact that they failed to ask me if I was left-handed: the pen pocket on the inside of the jacket was on the wrong side. … If I were a more patient man who cared immensely about the placement of the pen pocket, I would’ve held the Michael Andrews Bespoke to their satisfaction guarantee. However, the truth is that it’s not all that important to me, and I already felt that seven weeks was long enough to wait.”

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About

Whitney Hess is a coach and writer helping product teams and senior leaders make better decisions through the principles of user experience. She believes empathy builds empires.

Follow @whitneyhess

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  • http://www.greatnorthelectric.com Donna Lichaw

    Getting a bespoke suit is the epitome of having a product, er, tailor made for you – I had a suit made for me last year by a men’s tailor because I couldn’t find what I wanted off the women’s racks. The tailor put in an interior phone pocket so that I could easily access my phone while at parties without access to a bag or coat.

    …Of course, then, the jacket also needed a splashy lining so that you could show off that the suite is bespoke, lest I spend all that money on a bespoke suit and not be able to communicate its’ value to men (I say men because it appears I am not the only woman to not know the underworld of bespoke suit language).

    That all said, its a neat process – they make sure to fully understand how/when/where you will use the suit and build a vellum equivalent of a “prototype” for you to essentially usability test before they build the real suit with real expensive fabric.

    I’m not sure if women have an equivalent to this in western society – I don’t think dressmakers put phone and pen pockets in custom brides maids gowns. I do think they make saris with phone pouches in India, though.

  • http://jonathanpberger.com jonathanpberger

    Going in the complete opposite direction from Donna’s bespoke suit solution, I prefer a $8 pen that attaches to my keychain. I don’t need a pen all that often (lots of my data-capture happens on a phone), but when I do, I’ve got one at-hand.

    http://www.amazon.com/True-Utility-Telepen-Telescopic-Pen/dp/B002K9J26W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319898014&sr=8-1

    • http://www.whitneyhess.com/blog whitney

      But jingling keys in your pants pocket? :)

  • http://yuda.org John Yuda

    Pen pockets are great. Higher-end off-the-rack suits often have them as well.

  • http://harborsights.com tom

    why not have a pen pocket on both sides?