If you haven’t seen Diamondback’s immutable reach into the toolpouch-wearing trades, then you must genuinely be off the grid. These guys are everywhere, it seems, and using social media to more than just megaphone, “Hey, we have a new product; hey, we have a new product.” The company is using it to inform itself on how to build belts and services that it thinks can help its customers—us. “A lot of what we do is catching up toolbelt designs with modern techniques and tools,” says Connor Crook from Diamondback. “Most guys are not carrying around 8s and 16s anymore. They have an impact with screws or a nail gun with sleeves or coils. The best ideas come from customers, because they actually know the gaps in the market and where belts can be improved.”
Diamondback enables you to customize the belt and bags that hang on your waist. It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it situation. More than any other maker, it seems to be able to get you a tool pouch (nail bag, whatever you call it) that works best for you. I know this is starting to sound like marketing copy, but I’ve seen it firsthand, and I think—as a wearer of a “Frankenbelt” my whole adult life—it’s cool. What customers tend to do, says Diamondback, is to have a larger bag on the left for fasteners, which nets out to combos like Ox/Elias, WrangellXL/Elias, or Wrangell/Talon. And if you have bags or suspenders or a hammer holder from another brand, that’s OK; they’ll probably fit on the Diamondback belt or otherwise weave into its overall system. Oh, and these belts have a “gun loop,” which looks ingenious for toting a spiker around and not have it banging off your legs. Diamondback says it has well over a million combinations. toolbelts.com
