About Treksumo
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wanted to purchase an outdoor product but were unsure about which one would best suit your needs? Even worse, have you ever bought a product only to discover later that it wasn’t the right fit for you? We can relate to that experience, which is precisely why Jake and James founded TrekSumo.
At TrekSumo, our mission is straightforward: to provide the world’s most comprehensive outdoor gear reviews. We firmly believe that the most reliable gear reviews are rooted in unbiased, independent testing of each product. Our reviews come complete with ratings, pros and cons, and expert insights, all designed to assist you in choosing the perfect products tailored to your specific requirements, budget, and interests.
You can rely on our reviews because of our unwavering commitment to producing impartial, reviews built on thorough hands-on testing.
Here’s our approach:
- We identify what we consider the best products in various categories.
- We purchase all the products we review ourselves, just like any consumer, ensuring complete objectivity and independence in our evaluations. We do not accept free evaluation units or receive payment for endorsements from manufacturers.
- We then subject these products to comprehensive real-world field conditions, meticulously assessing their performance, user-friendliness, and reliability.
- We rate the products, where possible providing comparisons and differences between similar gear items, and recognize the best ones with our endorsement.
- After we conclude our testing and reviews, we retain many of the products as a reference set for future evaluations (trust us, all the gear we keep will be used until it falls apart) and sell the rest.
How We Sustain Ourselves:
TrekSumo is a free service that relies entirely on support from our readers. We conduct our product selections and reviews with utmost objectivity and independence. Our revenue is generated from both ads and when you click our affiliate links and make purchases of the products we have reviewed. This enables us to continue our testing efforts.
Should you click on a retailer’s link on our website and make a purchase, the retailer will contribute a portion of the sale to help maintain our site – at no additional cost to you, and it’s a straightforward way to contribute to the funding of our gear reviews. We are grateful for your support of our work!
Independent Product Selection:
Our review process kicks off with the selection phase. We thoroughly assess hundreds of products to identify the top contenders in each category. Subsequently, we personally purchase these leading contenders to subject them to in-depth, hands-on testing.
A Strong Dedication to Rigorous Testing
In our pursuit of fairness and accuracy, we establish a comprehensive set of objective tests tailored to each product category. These tests serve as a vital tool in quantifying the significant distinctions between competing products.
We subject each and every product to meticulous testing protocols that highlight crucial performance variations. Our approach encompasses extensive real-world field tests, meticulously crafted by seasoned experts. These tests involve putting products to the test in challenging conditions to assess how they stack up against their rivals. Additionally, we integrate these field assessments with in-house laboratory testing, providing us with quantifiable data that informs our comparative analyses and performance ratings. On occasion, we use trusted testers – specialists in their respective domains, such as: backpackers, campers, skiers, hikers, and trail runners (in fact, runners of all types. Each team member knows their discipline, each possessing a discerning eye for detail, quality and excellence. What you get in return is a review written by seasoned outdoors people with years of hands-on experience and a wealth of knowledge to enrich our reviews.
