Look. You either have one, want one, or you're currently explaining to someone at a conference why it matters that you have one. There's no fourth state.
The Flexoptix Buff has been around since 2012. Before half the people reading this had their first BGP session. Before "cloud-native" was a phrase anyone had to endure in a vendor deck. Before every conference booth came with its own tote bag full of things you'd leave in the hotel room.
It started as conference merch. It became something else entirely, and nobody planned it that way, which is honestly the only reason it worked.
Here's what actually happened: people kept it. Not in a drawer — on them. At the next event. And the one after that. The Buff showed up at RIPE, NANOG, DENOG, TNC, and somewhere around forty NOGs. It survived maintenance windows, airport delays, datacenter crawl spaces, that one migration that was supposed to take two hours and took nine, and the kind of 3 AM debugging sessions where you've stopped being polite about the vendor documentation.
It's been in deserts. It's been under raised floors pulling cable. It's been on stage at keynotes and on the necks of people who genuinely would rather fix a flapping BGP session than sit through another analyst briefing. The uptime on this thing is better than most of the infrastructure the people wearing it are responsible for.
The claim — Less Bullshit More Engineering — wasn't a marketing decision. It was a diagnosis. The community read it and went: yeah, obviously. That's the full review. No focus group. No A/B test. Just instant recognition from people who spend their professional lives in a field where the gap between what vendors promise and what actually works is a daily reality.
Others tried to copy it. Some got the dimensions right. A few got a decent print. None of them got the part that matters, because that part isn't on a spec sheet. You can reverse-engineer a Buff. You cannot reverse-engineer fourteen years of people choosing to keep wearing one.
People don't ask for pens at our conference booth. They ask if we still have Buffs.
And now — for the first time since 2012 — it's getting a new design. Not from an agency with a mood board and a Pantone swatch. Not out of an internal brainstorm where someone's cousin "does graphic design." Not from anyone who's never had to explain what an IXP is, or why that latency number matters, or why the coffee ran out two hours before the maintenance window closed.