Anytime I see a product that solves a common problem without using a single battery, wire, screen or circuit board…I take notice. I love seeing Product Designers take the most striaght-forward path towards a solution. No tech for tech’s sake. Pocket Bellows accomplished that in remarkable fashion. I love everything about how they executed this handy little tool.
What Is It?
Pocket Bellows is an extendable metal tube that the user blows into to stoke open flame. If you’ve ever started a fire from kindling, I’m sure you’ve found yourself, more than once, on all fours, in the dirt, putting your face into the billowing smoke as you try to provide much needed oxygen to get the fire burning hotter. It’s not a pleasant process. And to be honest, not a very efficient one either.
When you blow air from your mouth, it spreads out wide very quickly. You loose the concentration of oxygen rich air that the fire needs to truly get going. Not to mention you have to aim the direction of the air while often times closing your eyes and placing your face into an already smokey area. So many things about this are cumbersome and ineffective.
Enter Pocket Bellows.
It allows you blow extremely concentrated, extremely focused air right onto the specific area of the fire that needs it most. Not only does it give you significantly more length so you aren’t putting your face so close to the fire, but it also provides an amazing amount of accuracy you previously wer unable to achieve.
Once you’re finished using it, you collapse it down back to it’s original size, and place it in it’s handy storage case it came with.
That’s all there is to it! An extremely simple tool to accomplish a simple task. Gotta love it. Occam would be proud.
5 Fav Features
- Collapsible
- Creating the tool to be collapsible makes it far more portable. This thing collapses down to a size a bit bigger than a tube of lipstick.
- Carrying Case
- It’s a great addition that they include a carrying case. As it gets dirtier with use, it’s much more convenient to throw it in there than in your bag to get things covered in ash/soot.
- Affordable
- It’s obviously cheap to make, but it would have been easy for them to overcharge as companies often do. But this thing hovers around $12-$14 on Amazon which is certainly affordable.
- Length
- When extended, I think it’s the perfect length. Much longer and it’d be less portable. Much shorter and you’d be back on all fours where you started. I think they nailed it.
- Rounded Edges
- Since it’s made out of metal, it would have been easy to not think of rounding the edges of the metal around the mouth. I really appreciate the peace of mind knowing I’m not going to cut my lip with one wrong move.
Summary
- Pros
- Extremely simple tool requiring no instructions or maintenance of any kind.
- Is incredibly effective at solving the problem it was created to solve.
- Cons
- This isn’t a knock on the product…it’s just the nature of using your mouth to blow into something. But it can get pretty wet on the inside and honestly it’s just kind of gross when you collapse it and spit squeezes out haha. If you’re super concerned about it, just lay it out after using it instead of collapsing and storing in its case immediately.
