To help reinforce the idea that its clothing is designed for rugged outdoor adventures, Columbia is turning the informational hang tags on some of its garments into stainless steel survival tools that do everything from cut wood, to fix clothing tears, to filter water.
It’s first and foremost a clever marketing gimmick for Columbia. After all, the hang tags these tools are designed to replace are themselves nothing more than another way to promote the garment’s many claimed features to consumers. They could be eliminated altogether, but that’s just not going to happen anytime soon. So at least Columbia has come up with a way to make them slightly more useful.
There’s no word on which Columbia items will receive the upgraded hang tags and they’ll still include important instructions about how to clean and care for the garments. They’ll also feature a website link to a video that demonstrates how the survival tool is supposed to be used, although that’s not particularly useful if you’re trying it out for the first time in the middle of nowhere, with no cell signal.