If my recent post about Klein’s Hybrid pliers seemed a bit odd, it admittedly was.
I started the post off as a giveaway, and then rewrote it with only the subtle suggestion of a giveaway.
There are two prizes.
Mason – you won the folding hybrid multi-tool and a $25 Home Depot gift card!
David Z – you won the hybrid pliers and a $25 Home Depot gift card!
(I’ve already emailed you both for your shipping info – check your inboxes!)
Klein sent me this media kit a while ago, along with two gift cards. A note asked me to try out the pliers and give the gift cards to a reader so they can buy one for themselves.
As an aside, I love the time and effort that goes into media kit packages like this. I tend to keep the packaging way longer than I really should.
Home Depot is Klein Tools’ exclusive retail partner, and so that’s where the two $25 gift cards are for.
These tools don’t align well with my wiring tool preferences, and I found myself reaching for other tools every single time. I never used these naturally as part of any electrical or wiring project.
Klein has a lot of different tools with overlapping functionality, and I could never really place these. I used (and continue to use) other Klein tools that work better for my needs.
Usually when this happens, when I’m sent a tool that I am ultimately unable to test naturally, I pass them on to someone else for feedback or potential guest/contributor review.
Maybe these hybrid pliers are suited to meet certain pro preferences that I simply don’t see. I would like to understand that, which is why I ultimately posted about them.
Since there are gift cards tethered to these tools, that required me to keep everything tethered together. I couldn’t give away the gift cards outside the context of sharing about these tools, and I also didn’t want to post about the tools until I had something more substantial to say.
How do I write an entire post centered around “these are great tools, but I found that I never used them and don’t know why I would recommend them over some of Klein’s other nearly identical tools”?
I wrote an informational post about the pliers when they first came out, and with all this time, I had nothing more to add to it.
This doesn’t usually happen to me. I have 3 or 4 (at least) types of Klein wire strippers that can all handle the same job. And, I also have multiple fine and heavier wire gauge versions of some of them. I can recommend each of these tool to different types of users, but the same wasn’t true for the hybrid pliers.
The time has come, and I wanted to do a giveaway to get the tools and gift cards into readers’ hands.
But, I really didn’t want the giveaway to be picked up by “contest sites.”
I also couldn’t find a way to separate things. If I offered the tools and gift cards together, maybe some readers would express interest in the tools when they really only wanted to win the gift cards.
So, I shared what I could, tallied up all of the commentors that expressed interest in the tools, and picked winners.
I thought this was fair – one reader gets the hybrid pliers multi-tool and a gift card, and another gets the Journeyman hybrid pliers and a gift card.
(I was actually going to choose just one winner, but the second comment mentioned interest in the multi-tool after previously owing the hybrid pliers.)
I’m open to ideas on how I could do this kind of stuff better in the future. Thankfully, I don’t usually receive unsolicited tools with free gift cards attached to them. But I have been trying to come up with a way to pass samples to readers in a quick and low-effort manner on occasion.