I recently returned from Modex 2026, the supply chain and logistics trade show in Atlanta. In addition to being able to visit the booths and exhibitions of various companies, I also had the pleasure of partaking in the age-old tradition of getting tons of free stuff. I made it my mission to steal I mean collect as many branded pens as I could find. Here are my results.

Over the course of two and a half days, I managed to collect a grand total of 235 pens. While there certainly were many booths with pens that slipped through the cracks, I’m confident I visited most of the booths. So with a margin of error, roughly 21% of all the booths at Modex were giving out free pens.

Now I’m not just content with giving you the pen count. As you might guess from seeing the photos above, I also sorted the pens to gather quantitative data on my haul. Over the course of 4 hours I collected the following information:

• Name of company being represented
• Color of pen
• Pen weight
• Pen mechanism
• Ink type
• Ink color
• Write performance (subjective opinion on my end)
• Does the pen have a touch screen stylus
• Is the pen a stock model and if yes which one
• Additional info about the company printed on the pen
• Additional protection or accessories
• Miscellaneous notes about the pen

Let’s start with pen colors

I was debating on whether to put pens that are for blue/white just in the blue category but those really are perfectly split down the middle in color. Black and blue were definitely the most popular. Of the 235 pens, 58 of them match the color of their ink.

Next let’s talk weight

Generally most pens weighed between 7g and 13 g. But there was a huge chunk of pens in the 18g. Which can mostly be attributed to a certain stock pen model I’ll go over later.

As for mechanisms, there weren’t that many

Most of the pens were click pens with a tie between cap pens and twist pens (19 each).

Ink type and Ink color are next

Most pens are regular ball point ink (total of 188) with 46 being gel-ink and only 1 being erasable. 

Black ink was the most popular ink color (178). Blue at 48. 4 were those multi colored click pens. 1 pen was teal. 1 was red. And 3 straight up did not write. So I do not even know their color. That’s represented in yellow in the pie chart above.

Next we have write performance, which might be one of the most important stats

The results are shown below:

I tested every single pen and rated them out of seven. My criteria was mainly smoothness, visibility of the ink, and how hard you need to press to actually write visible words. 

Here are the pen winners and pen losers

These pens all scored a 7 out of 7 for me when it comes to write performance 

• Beast Wire Mesh
• Webb-Stiles
• CTG
• Raymond
• SAB Cable
• Fsip Electronics
• Tenson
• Ergotron
• Logistick
• Körber
• Advanced Intralogistics
• DCPower Technogies
• Miebach
• Seegrid
• Prolann

The ones highlighted are all part of a stock pen model. The un highlighted ones are presumably also stock pen models but ones that only appear once out of the 235 pens I collected. A fun bit of correlation is that 100% of the pens that got 7 out of 7 had waxed tips for protection. The underlined pens were ball point pens whereas the rest are gel-ink.

Pen losers include the companies

• Atlanta Airport
• Lift-Rite
• Bito
• Push-X
• Franz Morat Group
• DS Automotion
• Qimarox

These are all 1 out of 7 or lower. The latter three who all did not write at all. Note that none of these pens had waxed tips or any sort of protection for the tip. 

Overall, 40 pens or 17% of all the pens had waxed tips.

Let’s talk presentation

If you’re a pen at a trade show representing your company, you need to do a good job of conveying information.

Apparently most companies (176 total) only put their logo and maybe a tagline or slogan. 41 companies include a website. 12 include a website and phone number. 3 include just a phone number. 1 included phone number, email, and website. But none include just an email. 1 was completely blank. Like it just had no printing whatsoever. 

4 pens came with plastic sleeves but the best pens come in proper carrying cases. This honor would go to Conlida who had this lovely case for their pen.

Continuing with presentation, it’s pretty clear that many companies went to the same stock pen supplier and simply asked to put their logo on it. 

I don’t have an actual way of categorizing the different stock pen models I found so I just labeled them with letters. This distribution vaguely looks like Zipf’s law but not actually. 

This pen model was definitely the most common. It appeared a grand total of 37 times, making up almost 16% of the total pens. 

There were a lot of pens that were difficult to categorize. For example these are clearly different models but they look similar.

Or these pens that have the same logo but the actual pen model is different.

I won’t show every stock pen model because there’s too many. But here’s some examples of repeat stock pen models. 

There are some higher end ones such as branded Pilot G-2 pens. But there’s also super generic BIC ballpoint pens as well. 

At the end of the day, only 93 pens were unique models.

There were also tons of gimmick pens. Some pens were like multi tools and came with little utilities like rulers or screw drivers.

Although it appears the compass isn’t that great given how they all point different directions…

Of the unique pens with extra stuff I’ve observed pens that have

• Biodegradable casing
• Multiclick and multiple ink colors
• Ruler on them
• Screwdriver 
• Flashlight
• Bubble level
• NFC tag that doesn’t appear to do anything          
• Fidget clip
• Highlighter
• Light up logo

And here’s just some more pens I thought were cool

And that concludes my research at Modex. Here’s the raw data if anyone wants to take a look at it themselves:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRQSYvTj2BjvQOQneHLduxQAK5DJ22GBIdB4O4lZVDZQQeFCofFdP2s5BfzHgfd51YHhuNeQlE5Ux1L/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true