Whiskey Barrel Pen Bolt Action

I’m not the worlds most knowledgeable person when it comes to the ins and outs of Kickstarter, but finding this pen led me down an interesting path the other day.  The Whiskey Barrel pens caught my attention because I’m a big fan of wood pens as well as Jack Daniels, and although I’ve never owned a gun I have been shooting before and enjoyed it, so the grip here is kind of a cool touch which makes this a perfect storm pen for me.  As I researched a little more about the project though, I came across something odd.

Whiskey Barrel Pen

If you read the entire Kickstarter project description, you will find that the person asking for funding also has a website that they promote on the page.  Of course I wanted to go check out their site and see what was going on there, but to my surprise I came across two of the same exact pens there on their site already for sale.  The Kickstarter project does offer multiple other variations so its not a one for one match between thier website and the Kickstarter project, but its still odd nonetheless.    I don’t know why someone would fund the project on Kickstarter and wait until August to get the pen when they could go directly to this person’s retail website and just buy the pens there.

Maybe I’m missing something but this doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of what Kickstarter is all about.  It actually turned me off a bit on picking up one of these pens now that I’ve seen this.  I was kind of hoping that this might be a once and done run for these pens making them a little more unique.  I was on the fence about posting this if its really just a miss-use of Kickstarter to promote an already existing product.  On the other hand I learn a lot and come across a lot in writing this blog that I hope I can share with all of our readers to help them make better purchase decisions, so I think that in this case its  a good lesson learned.  Although I don’t think there is any malicious intent here by the project owner, its just not what I was expecting.

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