This Pilot Style Choice Carbon Open Long Zipper Pen Case in black caught my attention when I saw it on the new item release page at the JetPens website that you should bookmark and check every Wednesday. I love having a good solid pen case that looks great so this seemed like a great candidate and with our relationship with JetPens where we get to pick up some review samples free of charge I thought this would be a great item to check out. You can find it here at JetPens along with the other colors it is available in too.
The Pilot Style Choice Carbon Open Long Zipper Pen Case measures 9 inches long by 3.5 inches wide, and 2 inches high. These measurements are approximate though since its not a hard and rigid case. The close up also shows the faux carbon fiber texture which I was a little underwhelmed with to be honest. It has more of a vinyl look and feel to it in my opinion.
After getting past the look and feel of the texture, I went to unzip the case when I quickly realized something else that I became slightly dissatisfied about. The fact that the zipper first requires you to navigate a short and highly curved section going upwards before you hit a slightly less curved section soon afterwards makes it a bit awkward and not so easy to open quickly. The zipper doesn’t really snag or anything, its a very smooth zipper, but the path you have to take to open it doesn’t allow for quick maneuvering of the zipper track.
Once I had this sucker opened, I really liked the contrast of the nice bright red interior against the black body and inner elastic. There is one long elastic strap that is sectioned off into 4 pen loops and one flat section that I found was good for holding a lead container due to its flat nature. There are two pockets inside that measure 2 inches deep, while one is about 5 inches long, the other is about 2 inches long. Neither pocket has any sort of snap, zip, Velcro, or other sort of closure on them. These would be fine for some binder clips, lead refills, replacement erasers, sticky flags, memory cards, or other small accessories. You will just want to be careful though if you have pens in the pen looks that scratch easily because things could definitely slide out of the pockets and nick up your pens.
Here is a backed out look at the entire inside so you can see what I mean about the pockets and the one flat section of the elastic pen strap as compared to the other 4 loops. In addition to holding 4 pens in place via the loops, you can also lay a bunch of pens, pencils, or other accessories on top of where the pockets are. To be honest though, I don’t like having a bunch of loose stuff in a case like this that lays open flat because things can slide or roll out pretty easily. On top of that you still run the risk of any loose items in here knocking into the other pens in the pen loops and damaging them.
Overall, the Pilot Style Choice Carbon Open Long Zipper Pen Case certainly has some nice style to it, but it wouldn’t be my first choice for a pen case due to the zipper, and inner storage situation. It just doesn’t see like a well thought out offering to me. There are definitely other much better pen cases out there, but definitely take a closer look at JetPens if you think this one is for you, but considering the fact that JetPens has over 350 different pen cases on their site, I’d highly suggest that you check out some of those instead.
