About us
Who we are
We are committed users of outdoor gear-professional guides, product engineers, specialty shop employees, athletes, writers, and everyday outdoor people. And we're stoked about good gear.
To learn more about the people behind Gear Institute, visit Our Experts Page.
What we do
Our goal is to professionalize outdoor gear testing. We conduct fair, thorough, head-to-head tests of comparable outdoor products, both under controlled conditions and in appropriate real-world field-testing scenarios. We publish our testing criteria and open our methodology to discussion.
How we do it
Above all, we strive to provide fair, objective, and credible product reviews to the buyers of outdoor gear. That means we cannot and will not be influenced in any way by advertisers, product representatives, or our own biases.
What's the Gear Institute Rating?
The Gear Institute Rating is a dependable, transparent, and consumer-friendly online rating system for outdoor gear. The rating is a numerical score that evaluates a product's overall performance based upon selected objective criteria, allowing consumers to directly compare the performance, value and durability of similar outdoor gear products at a glance.
Review:
Ex-Outside Associate Editor Justin Nyberg paid his gear dues as Executive Editor for the Outside's Buyer's Guide, working on every BG for six years before co-founding the Gear Institute. The sharply designed site is easy to navigate by category and packs a lot of information in to a small space thanks to its use of illustrated ratings along with words and images.Blister Gear Review
About us
Blister was born from a passion for playing in the mountains, and a frustration with the lack of honest, available information about the gear we use to do what we love.
Our mission is to offer the most honest, in-depth, and useful reviews of outdoor sports equipment. Outdoor gear is expensive, and if it doesn't perform properly, you will waste a bunch of money buying the wrong stuff, or you may experience equipment failures at very inopportune times.
Review:
Blister Gear Review, the youngest site on this list, is certainly the most thorough about its treatment of outdoor gear. Their reviewers are all top-level athletes and they test the dickens out of gear before writing about it. It's true long-form, the average length of a review of a single piece of gear is 1500 words, and they take advantage of those words by really breaking down the minute performance and design details that matter when you are using high-end gear.