Pocket Revolutionary

Looking for an alternative pen (I love you, G-2, but I just want to know my options), I ran across the website for Tul pens. Their handwriting analysis toy (I don’t know what else to call it) was actually pretty imaginative and kept me on the site, made me send my wife to the site, and made me want to post it here. For a pen that’s inexpensive and sold only at OfficeMax, I thought it was surprisingly creative, and I might just check out their pens now. The lesson is that sometimes your “hook” for viewers can be engaging and only tangentially related to your core business to pique somebody’s interest. Of course, this also goes horribly wrong or just lame on a lot of well-known corporate websites with bizarre or completely random advertising, but for a relatively unknown or small company it can be very effective and you’re not risking very much if it does go wrong. I didn’t know who Tul was before, and if their website was just “good” then I would quickly forget who they were. If I didn’t like the handwriting analysis, then I might go somewhere else or I might skip to the catalog. Either way, the only way to keep my attention was to risk it on a Flash toy.

[via tul.com]