First and foremost, we are a community of gear junkies. Not many things make us happier than getting our hands on a cool gadget to see if it’s actually worth the hype. We’ve been at this long enough to know that most of them turn out to be just gimmicks with decent marketing. But we also know that a small percentage of them turn out to be gamechangers and really add to our quality of life (👋 The Ridge Wallet]). This website is where we share our finds so that you can save yourself the time, energy, and money of trying them out yourself (and so that our friends and family don’t have to pretend to care when we drone on about them).
In terms of our criteria, we look for products that:
- Are best in class in terms of fitness for purpose — is it 4-5 stars at doing what it claims to do?
- Bring pleasure to the user — does it delight with performance, user experiences, looks and feel, or…ideally all of the above?
- Deliver good value — is the cost <> benefit reasonable?
- Are built to last — will it stand up to intended use and delight the user through useful life?
- Family-level good — would we recommend it to our closest friends and family?
From the outset, we felt strongly that the website should be free to readers without compromising its future (ie we didn’t want it hand-to-mouth), but we also didn’t want it powered by annoying display ads. So far we’ve figured two main ways to solve this. First, we include (the usual) affiliate links to some of the featured products so, if you find our content valuable, you can support us at no extra cost to yourself (we get a commission every time you buy through one of our affiliate links). Second, we developed an ingenious solution (we think it is anyway) where we charge featured brands for the ability to reuse our content in their marketing. We think it’s pretty nifty seeing as it allows us to stay independent (only available to brands we have already reviewed/approved), keep the website access free to you (our audience), while making sure we have a way to keep the lights on.