Our Gear Editor, Will Sileo, puts the latest and greatest wetsuits to the test at Ocean Beach. Photo: Skyler Fitzmaurice
Hi there! Welcome to The Inertia Gear Reviews. We’re stoked you made it, and we’re excited to help you make the best decisions possible when deciding how to spend your hard-earned money on gear designed to make you time in the surf or outdoors more enjoyable. In that spirit, we wanted to offer insight and transparency into our gear review process.
First and foremost, the main goal of The Inertia Gear Reviews is to help you, the reader, make the best purchasing decision possible. Why? Well, first, we just love to help people out. It sounds corny, but there’s no better feeling than hearing from a friend, or even a complete stranger, that an article we wrote helped them pick up a wetsuit that’s kept them in the lineup a little longer when it’s freezing and the surf is pumping. That feels good.
To do that, our reviewers spend hours, days, months, and sometimes years testing the best gear on the market (or soon-to-be on the market) to give informative feedback, quick-hitting top picks, and buying advice.
Our process for doing so is fairly simple. We lean on our seasoned staff and experts to offer decades of experience as surfers, snowboarders, skiers, and lovers of the outdoors to figure out what are the key components to a good piece of gear in each category. We then compile our list of the best products available in that category of gear, get our hands on samples provided by manufacturers to test or purchase our own, and work to compare and score each piece of gear in the relevant categories. From there, we rank the products in our reviews based on their respective scores as well as any specific pros and cons we encounter, and make our decisions on top picks.
We use affiliate links to earn a commission on purchases made through links on our site, and that has no impact on our reviewers’ recommendations. We never suggest products we wouldn’t use ourselves. Furthermore, if you purchase something we recommend, and you don’t like it and return it, any commission we receive is retracted. So it’s in our best interest to stand behind the products we recommend.
We also don’t accept payments to review gear. Full stop. Our gear reviews are subjective assessments by our expert reviewers evaluating the merits of each product. Trust from our valued readers is exceptionally hard to earn and even easier to lose, so we take it very seriously as our goal is to do right by you.
Any sponsored content related to products is clearly marked with an Editor’s Note at the top. Those paid partner features refrain from making subjective, personal claims about the functionality of products.
While we strive for perfect journalism, we all have biases, so here are a few of ours: we love well-designed products with clean aesthetics. We love durability and have a penchant for sustainability. We’re suckers for value, so price is always a consideration, and we do our best to feature items that provide great bang-for-buck through our “Best Value” picks.
Thanks for supporting The Inertia by reading (and maybe even making purchases using links included in) the gear reviews we have worked hard to create. If you have feedback or perhaps we missed your favorite piece of gear in a recent review, feel free to shoot our Gear Editor a note at will@theinertia.com to connect.
Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you in the surf or mountains soon.
