All posts tagged lightweight clothing

You carry a firearm and have to think about Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer apparel, here’s some suggestions

tactical apparel It looks like Woolrich Elite Series Tactical is no more and the clothing has been drying up for some time now.   They never seemed to be able to move on and market their products after Backyard outfitter ceased marketing their products.    Even after all of these years of selling things that competed in the market against the 5.11 products, we still have customers coming in and bashing the 5.11 product line as having sub-par quality control.  It’s one reason why we don’t stock their clothing in large quantities.   Much of the fabric shrinks or falls apart and we don’t want to deal with the customer complaints for tactical pants, tactical shirts, tactical vests or jackets since this happens so much.   They are truely a monster of a company but there are better quality products out there for less money.

Finding shirts that fit you is something you are going to have to try out for yourself, the Blackhawk and Tru-Spec product lines have very good quality control, but sizing and fit are going to be different.  Everyone asks us how the cut is and every shirt and even some styles are cut differently.   TruSpec tactical apparel has uniform and tactical shirts as well as concealed carry shirts and the fabric, lightweight and ultralightweight tactical shirts are very different.  The gunny tactical line gives a different angle to the product line and the Tru-Spec 24/7 Series clothing and the Tru-Spec Simple Tactical clothing is going to really cut into Blackhawk and 5.11 tactical market just based on quality control and price points.

Top

What’s up with those cotton prices?

We got several warnings from some of the apparel companies we’ve been selling that prices are going to go up on all of the clothing that we are selling.  This is entirely up to the fact that cotton demand has exceeded production capabilities and there has been a shortage of cotton.   We knew something was wrong last year when one of our clothing manufacturers didn’t have any of it’s lightweight clothing available when Spring came and nothing showed up for Summer.   Now that we have a large number of deployed Military and private Contractors being deployed over seas in  hot climates, there is a large demand for lightweight tactical clothing.  Unfortunately we couldn’t name one company that makes all of the best lightweight clothing because each has it’s own good and bad points.   I’m still not happy that the Eotac Style 301 shorts stopped being made last year because I do not like the shorter inseam 302.

I have had some of the 5.11 tac lite pro shorts, but they are too tactical looking for most of my Summer adventures.   I think it was smart to make them a cotton polyester variant especially since Cotton prices have gone up, it’s probable going to be more common to see synthetic materials blend into clothing.   You sure can’t beat the 100% cotton ripstop tactical pants from Eotac though.   We get a lot of requests from guys in Iraq and Afghanistan that love the Style 203 pants because the pocket designs and the fit is superior to the similarly looking pants from 5.11 tactical pants.   I remember being at a trade show last year and some of the guys were joking about how hard it was to tell what clothing company made various pants because they all looked the same. The truth is, they don’t all feel the same.

Top
Page 1 of 1