I'm not a fan of useless and wasteful promotional items. If you've ever attended a trade show you know exactly the sorts of junk I'm talking about. I do like the idea of promoting our business but not with crappy items that have a short, futile life before ending up in a landfill. Years ago I got a carabiner that was a giveaway with a bottle of Coppertone suntan lotion. I used the heck out of it for over a decade to keep my various bike lock, house, and work keys organized.
Ever since then, I've known that a durable, useful carabiner was out there, it was just a matter of finding the right one. When I decided to have some J.C. Lind Bike Co. carabiners made, I went into R&D mode and reached out to a handful of promotional nick-knack companies to get some samples. In almost every case the spring back on the closure left me with little confidence that it was going to last for very long. My next move was to head to my local REI, where I found these carabiners with a nifty-looking closure mechanism that appeared to be foolproof and built to last. I bought one and tried it out for a while to confirm the closure was as bombproof as I was expecting. It was.
So I got in touch with the company that makes them and was bummed when I found out their order minimums to get our logo put on them were out of our range. They were nice enough to reach back out to me a few months later when they were running a special on lower quantities and voila! We now have these super sweet, handy-dandy carabiners with our name on them that you can buy.
If you are a fan of our shop and think this would be a useful item to have, please go ahead and buy one for yourself and a friend while you are at it.
CAVEAT- I'm sure this is fairly obvious but do not attempt to do any mountaineering with this thing.
