All posts tagged 5.11 tactical gear

Backpacks, range bags, and customizing.

5.11 bagsI have so many brand names of nylon gear in my house it’s not funny.   I don’t even know some of the manufacturers names because they weren’t tagged very well.  It seems with the number of sales calls I get every year, there are about as many nylon makers as there are custom kydex holster makers.  There are certain things that we just push off to other companies because it’s too time consuming.   People are very particular about the type of bag they want and they will know it when they see it, but the problem is they want to hold it in their hands.    There are different points of placing molle straps and sometimes a bag has too much and sometimes too little.   There are is an endless supply of so called “tactical” backpacks, but unless you have the time to travel, good luck trying to find a store that  has evertything.

One of the main reasons we opened up a tactical store was so that our local customers could check stuff out before they purchased it.   5.11 tactical is a monster of a company and they have so many cool products that many of our Police and EMS personnel prefer the 5.11 bags primarly the Rush products.  The Rush messenger and Rush 24 and 72 are extremely popular with paramedics and ambulance companies.  Some military guys have been buying just about everything that we sell in multicam which makes the 5.11 Rush 72 backpack very popular.   We normally stock all of these items in our Broomall, Retail store so stop in and check them out.

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Shopping online or Shopping in a brick and mortar store

philadelphia Law Enforcement suppiesThere are a lot of things we learned in the last year about the Law Enforcement Community and sometimes its the small things that people want in your store and not the fancy stuff.   There are plenty of times we go to places like Youtube.com to watch the products that we sell to try and learn how to use them or to market them.   You can only read so much about a product but if you don’t know how something is used, certain terminology about a backpack might just confuse you.   There are so many differences between all of the bags we sell and sizes are something people have a hard time explaining.   The differences between the Rush 24 and Rush 72 5.11 bags is significant and sometimes people don’t know which one they want until they hold it in their hands.

Police Officers loose handcuffs and handcuff keys all the time and sometimes that 20yrd old holster needs to be retired.    We know have a Law Enforcement inventory and we are doing everything from Blackington badges and whatever else Philadelphia Law Enforcement Supplies like Safariland holsters, Blackhawk Serpa holsters and all of the pepper spray and batons that are used.   We have a pickup on location option on our website and stock a good bit of AR15 upper receivers and Magpul accessories.   Our Smith Optics Elite ballistic eyewear was used in the US Open here in Merrion and we are looking forward to bringing on even more products this Summer and Fall.

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Tactical pants and movement

While studying up on some of the new tactical clothing coming  out in 2012 I was reading some of the reviews and comments on YouTube about them.  It’s funny how often you see people reference that everything is a rip off of 5.11 tactical pants.   I’ve only been in the tactical clothing business for about 7yrs and I have to say that, that is partially true.   It was 5.11 that really had the entire market and nobody came close.   The truth is they still have the market but there are several competitors that are pretty close.  Tru-Spec and Blackhawk probable gained the most ground but Proper is still a monster in it’s own category.

One conclusion that one must come to with tactical clothing is along with quality control, tactical pants must allow for movement.   There are plenty of styles of tactical pants that have been pushed out in the market only to die a slow death when people realized there were design flaws.   One thing that is absolutely a reality about tactical pants is that a gusseted crotch is a must.   The old standard stitching, double stitching, triple stitching isn’t going to cut it. It’s about reducing stress not fighting it.

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