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
No estimated specs. No recycled product descriptions. No ratings we can’t verify. Every piece of gear we recommend has been used by real kids, in the field, long enough to know whether it holds up. When something doesn’t work, we say so. When we haven’t tested something personally, we say that too.
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 bunch of Amazon reviews you don’t trust either.
