Nothing on your desk right now has less design in it than the pen you're about to lose. Somebody still had to make that decision, and it was probably a Tuesday.
Branded pens are the last thing anyone briefs and the first thing that leaves the building. They get taken, pocketed, lent and never returned, which is failure everywhere else and the entire business model here. Nobody chooses one. It arrives, it works, it stays until it doesn't, and for a year your name is on the thing somebody signs their forms with. Small, dumb, weirdly effective — and the only real risk is that you designed something too fussy to survive the printing.
What survives is not much. The barrel is a cylinder, so the readable strip is a narrow band along the middle and it curves away on both sides — a word too long doesn't wrap, it disappears. The clip takes a bite out of one end, the click or the cap takes the other, and the seam has an opinion about where anything can start. Then there's the surface: pad print on gloss plastic sits on top, laser on metal cuts through the coating and comes back a different colour than you drew. Anything with a thin line or a fine gap turns into a mark. Most logos need to lose something before they can go on a pen. Better you decide what, than the machine.
These are what conferences, hotels, banks, clinics, universities and every trade show stand run on, and they turn up in stationery sets next to notebooks and cards. The sets here are minimal and close: plastic and metal ballpoints, click and cap types, matte and gloss barrels, single, paired and in rows, shot straight down and at low angles on clean backgrounds, so the artwork on the barrel is the only thing to look at. In the UK it's a biro whatever the brand says.