About Geargals
The Geargals
One of the Geargals doing her tough, tough job testing gear on a ski trip. It’s hard work but someone’s gotta do it.
The Geargals are a group of Alaskan women who truly care about their gear. We climb, ski, hike, hunt, fish, travel, and basically use the hell out of all of our gear. We got a little fed up with “unisex” gear that didn’t fit right or come in small enough sizes and “women’s specific” gear that was all form, no function, and didn’t hold up to ACTUAL USE. Imagine, wanting to USE the gear we buy! Amazing. So we decided to join forces to create this blog for all the women who want to know if women’s specific gear can really perform.
The Site
Geargals reviews whatever gear we’re crazy about, not-so-crazy about, and gear we’ve been asked to review. We review it by using it the way it was intended, usually over a long period of time. We will ski on it, climb with it, wear it, beat up on it, and really put it through its paces. We understand what it’s like to drop big bucks on an item and find that it doesn’t stand the test of time. It pisses us off, too! So our mission is to let our readers know what gear they can count on and what might let them down. We use the gear over the long term, and update our posts when we find that gear fails before it should (and we do give kudos when we find that we can’t damage an item no matter how hard we try).
We don’t have any label bias and we don’t pull any punches about what we like and what we don’t like. We try hard to review only gear that is made specifically for women, but we make exceptions, well, when we want to. Due to the lack of certain types of women’s specific gear (technical footwear is one of these offending categories), we will review “unisex” gear if we think it’s worth it and there aren’t many women’s versions available. Fair warning though; if it’s “unisex” we will probably not like the fit much and will make many grumbly comments about how “unisex” gear hardly ever works for us. We also make exceptions for non-gender-specific gear if we think it’s really neat.
Alaska is a GREAT place to test gear.
How to Submit Gear for Review
If you are a manufacturer or retailer and wish to have an item reviewed by Geargals, please contact us via email at jill@geargals.net. Let us know who you are by providing your company affiliation and contact information, and we’ll get back to you with our address and further contact info. We try to feature as many manufacturers as possible, so if you want to see your gear on our site, let us know! We’d love to hear from you.
If you send us an item for review and want it back afterwards, please include a shipping label. There’s only so much of our hard-earned cash we can feed back to the US Postal Service.
Can we advertise on Geargals?
If you are interested in advertising here, email us at jill@geargals.net and we’ll talk.
I’m an online merchant. Will Geargals link their review to a product I sell?
We link to products via the AvantLink Merchant/Affiliate program. We can link reviews directly to the products on your web site! Click the AvantLink ad below for more details.
