This was an interesting year for gear in a lot of ways — so I thought I would wrap up the year commenting on different gear categories and how they felt over 2025. In some ways there’s a lot of good out there, but in far too many other ways, it was disappointing.
I’ll go category by category.
Bags
I get the general sense that bags stagnated this year. Nearly everything I liked this year was nothing that’s new to the year. We are stuck in a cycle which is seeing two things o repeat: materials lust; and consolidation. These two things combine to make a very shit bag market.
Take consolidation, here you have iconinc brands like Mystery Ranch being bought out by Yeti, and gutting the heart of their operations in Montana. Now is this good or necessary long term? No idea, but probably not for the folks working there. But it does mean that a massive brand is now behind Mystery Ranch, and this means that the bags will need to hit a certain level of sales and popularity to continue production. It means that the odd quirky bags people have loved, are likely dead. And that’s just one brand, I suspect more will be sold or “invested in” like this over the coming years.
Arc’teryx Quintic 28
Materials lust, is likely a bigger problem and is really driving me crazy. I’ll fully blame Carryology under Taylor Weldon’s leadership for this. There’s extremely little need for the type of materials craze that this singular website has pushed to the forefront. Xpac, Ultra, Dyneema, fucking Denim, etc — these are all stupid fucking materials for bags. There are niche cases where these make sense, but going from your posh apartment in a city to your posh desk in an office where you complain about the flavors of the free sparkling waters, is certainly not the fucking place these materials are needed. You can cosplay on the way to the office all day that you like the material becuase it has a mythical quality which is hypothetically great for being on top of a mountain, but then I might remind you that as someone who’s been to many 12,000ft+ peaks, I tend to just see generic Patagonia backpacks up there, made out of like polyester or nylon at best. And yet somehow, they didn’t have all their gear spilling out ripping to shreds, and the 5oz in weight savings really didn’t matter, it is pretty wild to see these materials used in the dumbest ways. There probably does exist some dude who uses his office backpack to summit 14ers regularly, but then again there probably isn’t. Just as how people actually fighting in wars, have very little overlap with the tech-bros buying most of those bags.
The North Face Verto 18
So we’ve spent so much time this year with brands struggling to be financially viable, and gear heads pushing for every dumber materials, that we effectively did not get anything susbtantially better, new, or even that different. In fact, as fucking funny as it might sound, I think Arc’Teryx and The North Face did the most interesting bag work with the Summit Series Verto 18 for $99, the Quintic 28, and the Alpha SL 30. Each of those look far more interesting than anything else I’ve seen coming out of Carryology Collabs — becuase most of it has been the same shit with a newer useless and louder fabric applied to it.
Arc’teryx Alpha SL 30
What a fucking mess of our own making.
Knives
On a brighter note, knives had a simply fantastic year. There’s two reasons for this I can see: manufacturers didn’t cave to stupid gimmicks; and Magnacut continued to proliferate to every brand out there. This is good on both fronts. We saw new Victorinox knives with pocket clips and new designs that include a locking blade — holy bananas. Even more general budget brands like Gerber dropped Magnacut blades; and insanely stubborn brands like Benchmade adopted Magnacut more widely (notably, I do think Spyderco is taking a weird approach with Magnacut that it should only be for select knives, which is obviously dumb).
Gerber
If that wasn’t enough, Magnacut is not expensive. This means we got tons of newer knives with the best knife steel possible, all for the same, or sometimes lower, prices than we had been accustomed to when the world was ruled by M390. Add to that inflation running rampant here in the USA, and it really felt like there were some amazing deals to be had, which felt very anomalous.
Fantastic year for knives, and I look forward to seeing how these brands fuck it all up next year.
Flashlights
Kosen Ti VME, best light this year.
This is a tough one, or maybe more of a sad one. However, outside of what Kosen has been pushing Malkoff and others to do, the Flashlight market has been pretty shit. The reason here seems pretty clear to me: there’s too much cheap shit from China coming into the market which is making companies a killing, such that brands trying to innovate are struggling to get the market share (aka Sales) needed to peruse bigger ideas.
Look at Wurkkos, which had a few big moments this past year with well marketed releases of flashlights that are more gimmick than utility. This is genius from a company standpoint. I mean these are so inexpensive and fun looking that they sell like crazy. Most people don’t know why they want anything more, so they buy these up. They are literally competing with a cell phone flashlight and this is a very low bar.
The impact here is that by comparison a “good” flashlight suddenly looks shit by comparison becuase it doesn’t charge via USB-C and has no RGB gimmick lights on it. It is better, yes, but that’s not how the general consumer mindset works.
All of this means that there wasn’t a hell of a lot of interesting things happening. And a lot of the higher end makers fell into a cycle of: fancy new metal/finishing as a way of selling more. It’s hard to blame them for that, but fucking hell do we need some new drivers and UIs to come to the market because this shit is stale.
Technical (Outdoor) Clothing
A quick note on technical clothing here, as I needed a lot of refresh on this part of my wardrobe this year (from wearing out stuff).
I’ve found the market here to be quite good. There’s a heavy reliance on Polartech Alpha from the niche makers, but there’s a lot of really good stuff happening from the larger brands. Both innovation with more breathability, but also the plethora of garment types: breathable, waterproof, mixed use, durable, etc. On top of that a lot of brands took time this past year to revise the fits, and most of those revisions found garments with a trimmer body and longer sleeves, which works really well for me.
Most of this is relegated to the higher end of the brands. While The North Face, and REI both vastly expanded thier “look like you do the outdoors, but you only stay in the city” lines, they also both pushed forward the very technical items in extreme ways. I also was happy to see a dampening of expectations and ubiquity of Merino Wool as the solution for everything, and more innovation using more advnaced polyester and nylon blends. Even cotton making more of an apperance, as well as ‘Octa’ as an insulation material which seems like it will pay spades down the road.
Octa Hoodie from Norrona
This year felt a lot like a pushing around the edges year, so I am pumped to see what might come next year when we’ve better sorted out what is what, and where it is best used. Be sure to take a look at Norrona, specifically this jacket and this hoodie in Octa both are great looking.
Norrona Finnskogen
General Clothing
This year has been great for clothing overall — aside from the pricing increases thanks to US trade policies changing. Pants have filled out finally, where the leg width is sane, and the rises are slightly higher. This is good for everyone — it is nearly universal that men look better in a fuller cut than in a very slim-skinny cut and same with a higher rise. So too has shirting and tops followed the slightly fuller cut pattern.
While there are outliers pushing things really boxy, the norm for even trimmer fitting items appears to be landing closer to straight cut.
Additionally, the obsession with nylon and polyester as primary materials feels like it is giving way back to cotton. In the form of Denim, Duck, and Corduroy. All of this is good. The downside is that manufacturers still have not let go of adding elastane or spandex to cotton, but I suspect this too subsides with the increasing fuller cuts of garments.
At the same time, I’m seeing really interesting modernization of classic menswear in more stealth ways. Things like classic looking overcoats using goretex or newer synthetic insulation to add more while keeping costs (from thick wool) down. It’s not perfect, and it’s only starting to smoke around this, but this is a nice sign.
Even brands that have historically created really out-there looking designs (Vollebak) seem to have pulled back to make their garments look more ’standard’ for lack of a better term.
Ton Cloth w/ Primaloft
I’m optimistic about all of this, and it feels like the over-priced-fast-fashion is the only part hurting, which is acceptable. Leaving you with budget friendly fast fashion, and higher end offerings. I’m a fan of this move, like this Tin Cloth Cruiser with PrimaLoft.
Watches
What an absolutely fantastic year for watches. There are so many new, fantastic, releases it is hard to really encapsulate them all here. We have new materials, designs, movements, and brands all over. Nothing is boring on this front, and there are loads of new watches at lower price points hitting the market.
What’s perhaps most interesting is both the rise in watch wearing among the younger generations, and the steadfast interest and hype this year around “budget” watch offerings from the likes of Casio and others. This is stellar.
I was being checked into a party by a security guy the other day and he was wearing a lovely Hamilton vintage watch. When I complimented him on it, he told me that it was his grandfathers, and that his grandfather had worn it every day, and he too would wear it everyday. I’d peg it at 35mm at best, on an individual who was substantial in size. He went on to recommend a book to me about Hamilton watches, at least a passage from within the book — that’s not a moment I expect from a random guy in a tech-obsessed city. It’s an indicator of things to come. The younger generations might be fulfilling my dream of seeing smart watches die. While others are revolting against wait lists and buying $40 watches and flexing that shit. Hell yes.
Unimatic U2-GMT
Luxury watches may be more expensive than ever, but there are plenty of well priced options that remain, and often are better buys, than those luxury brands. Fantastic fucking year, I mean look at this.
Electronics
Not enough articles end on a sour note, but I can fix that here. It was a shit year for electronics. I think hardware makers by and large had no fucking idea what to do with the rise of AI. Random shit got AI slapped on it. New models came out promising to be AI super machines, only to be a miss a few months later as the industry shifted.
There’s nothing really standout from an electronics perspective as a big yes. Loads of incremental improvements out there, nothing of substance worth getting worked up about. That’s kind of wild to be honest.
Somehow for every gain electronics made, the tradeoff was almost impossible to accept. I’m told the iPhone 17 came out this year. I have the iPhone 16. Which means that I’ve bought every iPhone, starting on launch day. Until this last round. Make of that what you will.
It’s not like any of the other tech got better either. We just got half broken AI tools shoved into every goddamned thing.