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Urban Tool

Rob Beschizza at 8:33 am Wed, Dec 9, 2009

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urbantools.jpg The company behind these unusual and innovative "sport holsters" is named Urban Tool.

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  • oddible

    Riiight, and wearing a SHOULDER HOLSTER won’t get you harassed by law enforcement one bit. Good plan.

  • WalterBillington

    Sub-Urbane tools.

  • petemortensen

    @tumes

    I suppose the Ford Mustang doesn’t count, since the target demographic of wild horses could never manage to sign a lease?

  • Svenski

    Yep, the three clowns in the picture sure like urban Tools to me.

  • willy359

    Well hey, a guy’s got to have somewhere to stash his Blublockers, right?

  • David Pescovitz

    Umm…. I’m pretty sure Rob was in on the irony when he posted this.

  • nutbastard

    ok, i’ve noticed for a long time now that guys like these, they tend to get enormous amounts of tail. and i don’t understand it. regardless, in the end, i blame women for rewarding this kind of behavior.

  • Anonymous

    Ha! They think they’re impressing the ladies, but how many have built their own 64 terabyte RAID array? NONE PROBABLY!!!

  • milovoo

    Sure, it’s easy to make fun, but I could see that HipHolster being pretty darned useful if you were up on the roof setting up an antenna or something. They would be just fine to wear around the house. Like sweatpants the faux pas only arises when you take to wearing them everywhere.

    • Baldhead

      regardless of potential usefulness, this sort of marketing deserves a shunning of the product. ideally with an email telling them why. in fact…

  • Patrick Dodds

    “Conservative” is banned?

  • Baldhead

    “If you want to look like a…:

  • Anonymous

    these things seem a bit twee. i prefer the sporran.

  • Shelby Davis

    Well, I like them! Sometimes I only want to carry a sketchpad and a netbook/pda, and a regular backpack or suitcase is overkill. The details and styling are a little douchey, sure, but I think the overall concept is pretty cool! And I’ve never worn a fannypack, so there!

  • Enx

    I’m from mexico, and I bought an urban tool to an adress in the states of someone I know. The fact is that The urban tool never arrived to him, and urban tool claimed they have sent it. I never got a refund or something like that, they told me they have sent it. So i really liked those urban tools but now I’m so upset with them because their delivery system Sucks!

  • slywy

    I saw the photos and misread this as “Urban Fools.” Or did I misread it?

  • Ubernostrom

    I’m a little disappointed in their ‘holster’ line of products. I don’t think a single one of those could hold my pistol.

  • pinehead

    Something tells me this is the kind of thing those guys wear who always have their bluetooth earpieces on. Bluetooth earpiece, Kangol trilby and one of these body-fit purse/holster things. Oh, and some skinny girl-cut jeans. Ugh, I think I just got douche-chills from thinking about all that at once.

  • Rob Beschizza

    The original title of this post was in fact “Urban Tools,” but that struck me as insufficiently sublte.

  • Anonymous

    Exterminate!

  • scifijazznik

    has anybody noticed that these guys look like dorks?

  • RzrKitty

    Search Etsy for “Urban Holster.” I bought one a year ago for a great price, and it has all the utility of an fanny pack without the dumb look. I have NO relationship or affiliation with Etsy, or the Urban Holster vendor; it is just a great product! Their models don’t look lame, either.

  • Oren Mavro

    Speaking of modern etymology, as one user Xopher began I have to add:

    The words “douche-bag” and “douche” used to be used to describe people who behave like nonsensical, arrogant, combative jerks…

    [now bear with me, as I can be verbose:]

    Its now commonly used by combative people (jerks) as a catch-all phrase for anyone they don’t like for whatever nonsensical reason–
    often biases that offend their overly-sensitive(arrogant) egos. Talk about Irony.

    Also, as another user posted, regardless of how “douche-y” the models look–has anyone ever really noticed the use of the word “model”…
    you know mannequins are models, technically..think about it–These packs are useful and intuitive.
    they’re made for the urban contemporary going about their day-to-day for work or even just running errands.

    And they are especially useful for free-runners/ traceur/traceusess

  • mellowknees

    uh…the models do sort of look like urban tools.

    Oh, wait, you mean the BAGS are supposed to be the urban tools? My bad…

  • Anonymous

    YES – looking at that pic, the 1st thing to come to mind IS ‘Urban Tool’, or maybe ‘Urban Tools’, or maybe just douche bags….

  • Anonymous

    You mean the tools in the pouches or the phony posing punkass tools wearing the pouches?

  • mgfarrelly

    Those are some really lovely purses.

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, the guys in that photo are a bunch of tools, all right.

  • arkizzle / Moderator

    Really? You guys left this spot open? Seems too good to be true..
    OK, but you’ll beee sor-ry!

    *cough cough*

    Ha! Those guys really are Urban Tools.

    /Now, just so we don’t have to go through anything like that again, can we make sure the alarmingly* obvious* jokes are done before I get here? Super :)

    [*read: the company's marketing division shoulda been wa-ay ahead of us.]

  • arkizzle / Moderator

    Phew! Thanks for the backup guys :)

    Wanna get matching tools?

  • jimh

    The irony is included at no extra charge.

  • Anonymous

    Wow! Finally some TRUTH in name advertising!

  • SamSam

    Wow. Um. Is there anyone who looks at those models and says “That’s who I want to be?”

  • qwasson

    Looks like someone transposed the ‘product name’ and ‘target demographic’ fields somewhere along the line…

  • hail_diskordia

    Yeah, it’s a dumb name. But their products are actually very good. I came across them while looking for a bag of some sort to free-run with (hey, sometimes you gotta carry stuff). I now own a Hip-Holster-model bag, and I love it; very functional, more so than the pictures might suggest. So, y’know, make fun all you want, but there is some utility to these things.

  • pstarr

    is that ethan hawke?

  • cymk

    Its like some unholy collision of fanny packs, tool belts and messenger bags. Those models scream douche.

  • apoxia

    “fanny pack” – In at least New Zealand and the UK (and probably Australia)”fanny” means a girls privates, and by that I mean the va-jay-jay. We call fanny packs bumbags.

    These guys do look like a bunch of fannies.

    • Xopher

      In America ‘fanny’ means buttocks and ‘bum’ means a homeless man (but more pejorative; it implies that he’s just a useless human being, most likely by choice or severe alcoholism). So a bumbag, if anything, would be one of those things you see hoboes carrying on the end of a stick.

      ‘Fanny’, on the other hand, is also used as a woman’s name, though less so today. There was a famous American cookbook writer named Fanny Farmer, which I bet gets a good giggle in Ennzed. There was even a Broadway musical titled “Fanny.”

      Funny how words mean different things depending on where you go. For example, in many countries the C word is used as a generic insult, and a fairly mild one at that; in America it’s so offensive it’s banned from the comments of this blog.

      • apoxia

        Any mention of the name “Fanny” caused rapturous consternation when I was in primary school. I expect the percentage of people with the name Fanny would be much lower in NZ, UK, Australia etc. I was probably 11 or 12 before I realised fanny meant something else in the US. This would have been through exposure to US TV programs – which we get a lot of and which acquaints us with a lot of US culture.

        The “c” word is as offensive in NZ as it is in the US.

      • tumes

        Interestingly enough the specific term for the bag that hobos carry around is a bindle.

  • Ernunnos

    It was either “Urban Tool” or “Douche Bag”.

  • tikaro

    Ernunnos: HA HA HA +1 thank you!

  • Boba Fett Diop

    It’s not a purse! It’s European!

  • Super_sling

    These are awful!, though fanny packs and tool belts can work together, just look at Fabric Horse http://www.fabrichorse.com/index.php?page=utilitybelts

  • muteboy

    It’s Nathan Barley’s Chillum Holster!

  • petemortensen

    As I always say, when the meanest insult anyone can conceive to demean your product is the actual name of the product, you have failed the first law of marketing.

  • obdan

    Ernunnos for the win!

  • tumes

    This is marketing genius folks. How many of you can think of other product names that are also their target demographics?