About Good Better Best
The problem we kept running into
We’d end up on Amazon, scrolling through hundreds of reviews we didn’t trust, buying something with a 4.7-star rating and a six-week shipping window, and then watching it fall apart on the third trip. The ratings weren’t reliable. The gear wasn’t built for actual kids doing actual things outside. And there wasn’t a single place we could go that had already done the work — tested it, filtered out the junk, and just told us what to buy.
That site didn’t exist. So we built it.
Good Better Best is a kids’ outdoor gear review and destination guide site. Everything we recommend has been tested by our kids — currently ages two and four — in real conditions. We’re not reviewing gear from a conference room. We’re reviewing it on trail, at camp, in the rain, and occasionally in the back of a very muddy car.
WHO WE ARE
We’re Roxy and Ben. We’ve been testing outdoor gear together since 2017 — first as adults living full-time in a van, working for Elevation Outdoors and Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine and doing our best to break gear for adults for brands across the industry. We co-authored three Falcon Guides titles: The Falcon Guide to Van Life, Hiking Wyoming, and Hiking with Kids: Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks (2025). Roxy has managed gear review programs at Outdoor Prolink and supported the gear review team at Forbes Vetted; Ben has spent years reviewing gear and editing content for some of the most-read outdoor publications on the web.
Then we had kids. And we noticed the gap immediately.
All of that testing infrastructure — the methodology, the real-world rigor, the refusal to rubber-stamp something just because a brand sent it — and nowhere to apply it to the gear that actually mattered to us now. Kids’ gear reviews were thin, often unverified, and almost always written by someone who hadn’t actually tried to keep a two-year-old’s sun hat on their head for five hours.
We’ve been testing kids’ gear for four years, since our first was born. This site is where that testing lives.
How we do it
We start with research
For each category, we look at everything on the market and narrow it down to the 10 to 15 strongest contenders.
Then we take it outside, over and over.
Our kids test the gear, along with their friends and the kids of parents we trust, on real adventures. They wear it, roll in the mud in it, lose it (really), rip it, and occasionally declare it “terrible” or “the best ever.” We document all of it. Then we do it again.
Every review has a “what doesn’t work” section.
Every product has a weak spot, and you should know what it is before you spend your money.
If it isn’t good enough, it doesn’t make the guide. We’d rather recommend nothing than recommend something we wouldn’t buy again.
Brands don’t buy their way in. Some gear we buy ourselves, and some is sent to us by brands for testing. Either way, the ranking comes only from how it performed. We don’t publish sponsored reviews, brands never see a review before it goes live, and we earn through affiliate links, which you can read about in our Affiliate Disclosure.
The name says it all: every guide gives you a Good pick, a Better pick, and the Best pick, so you can find the right gear for your budget and your kid without wading through forty options and a pile of Amazon reviews you don’t trust either.
