I recently bought an Arbor Arms plate carrier. Nothing fancy, just their Minuteman. I sprung for their simple elastic cummerbund and also a molle / g-hook placard and got the price up to around $170 or so, but I'm very pleased with the purchase. The carrier is well-made and fits great, but it also is minimalist enough that I can shoulder my rifle pretty well and it has a lot of modularity and upgradeability built in. If I decide later that I want to go to a tubes attachment or other attachments with their proprietary three strand cummerbund, I can. it will also work with a JPC style three strand skeletonized cummerbund. They have a cleverly integrated bit of laser-cut paneling instead of molle which gives you a ton of flexibility in how they can be set up and still minimize bulk. Jon Zum is a genius. There are lots of other good plate carriers which are made in the USA, and if my wife knew how many of them I own, she might divorce me.
I've bought and sold kind of a lot of plate carriers. Like, dozens. I'm interested in their fit and function in a positively hyperfocused way which would only make sense if I was in the business of making them or selling them. Which I'm not. It's kind of ridiculous, and maybe in the unlikely event that my sewing skills ever exceed the level of sixth grade home ec, I might try to make one.
Plate carriers are essentially simplified body armor vests. Body armor, the kind that holds at least soft armor panels and possibly also hard panels, is elaborate because it covers more. The shapes have to mitigate bulk better and handle weight distribution differently. Ten years ago, plate carriers were an attempt to do more with less. To maximize mobility while focusing protection where it was needed; thus, a soft body armor panel shrank from a bell shaped torso silhouette overlapping around the ribs and shoulders to a panel not much bigger than a SAPI or shooter's plate, with a long, rectangular soft armor panels in the cummerbund around your sides joining them. The TAG Rampage works this way, among many others.
Fast forward to today, and a plate carrier is often the distillation of the simplest way to connect two plate bags at four points with the maximum amount of comfort and best weight management. This distillation is expressed in elegantly simple designs like the Ferro Concepts Slickster, the Arbor Arms Minuteman, the SKD PIG BRIG and dozens of other vaguely similar designs vying for your dollars. There's a reason the Slickster is never in stock anymore, and why it's possibly the most copied carrier design, right up there with the LBT 6094 and the Crye JPC. Like the Slickster, many designs are starting to omit the oft- unused molle/pals webbing in favor of a dvd case- sized panel of loop closure across the belly to slap a placard to and some webbing or laser cut paneling to attach g-hooks or swiftclips to.
But so what, right? The free market responds to supply and demand and more competition drives innovation and efficiency, so everyone wins, don't they? While I agree with this sentiment, I've noticed something weirdly troubling.
Whenever something is successful in the US, an overseas/ asian manufactured version comes out which duplicates it at a lower price and dilutes the market. Quality may suffer, but it does create options and after all; everyone's doing it. 'That's just how business works these days'. Can you patent a plate carrier design? If so, how much of it? And to what extent do we owe our loyalty and our dollars to those who created these original designs, only to see them cloned and cranked out in quantity, probably in sweatshops which also make high-end sneakers and designer t-shirts and handbags, down the street from the facility making the smartphone I'm using to write this?
Some brands made overseas own their foreign roots, while others may work to conceal them. Brands whose products used to be made in the USA have now integrated items in their lineup which are now made overseas, without exactly calling attention to this. I'm very reluctant to call out any one brand in particular, but I can tell you that the excellent Ares Armor Derma was utterly overshadowed by an overseas-made design which vaguely copied many of it's features but was utterly inferior to it when it came to materials, fit, and durability; and while the simplicity of a design like the Slickster may make the contrast between 'Made in Asia' and 'made in North America' (yes, I know that Ferro Concepts is Canuckistani- I mean, Canadian) seem negligible, people should take stock of both what they're buying and who they're buying it from.
At this point, I should probably cue the eagles to soar overhead and unfurl the American flag to the strains of a hard rock guitar solo or perhaps invoke the "cheap carriers- look, the poors are at it again," trope. Or maybe just assure you that "lifesaving equipment isn't a smart place to cheap out, bro." But I'm not going to.
Instead, I'm going to urge you to look really hard at five or ten different designs which are clones of the Slickster. Plate carriers which join two platebags with a 4" band of elastic on each side and some simple provision to hang a triple magazine placard or chest rig pouch conglomerate off the front. They've often got the name "low-visibility" or some abbreviaton of the same in the title. Look at their price point, too. If they're not being advertised as outright airsoft- grade goods, often they're likely priced at least around what I paid for the Arbor Arms Minuteman, and while they may have all the right 'features', the right styling and marketing and buzzwords, they're an inferior imitation of the genuine article, made by well-meaning citizens of nations whose governments don't have our best interests in mind, and if that isn't becoming more and more clear to you these days, you're not paying attention.
But look closely. I have found at least five carriers which share mild variations on essentially the same plate bag design and elastic cummerbund, often with simple slots sewn into the cummerbund for magazine retention, with the same integral zip closure admin pouch. Some of them share the same shoulder strap shape but have different loop or laser cut paneling on the front, some have two loops of webbing running down each side while others have four, while others still have different shoulder strap shapes integrated into the same plate bag and integrate the swiftclip buckles under some elastic covers to minimize their bulk, but they're all riffs on the same theme and the traits they have in common strongly suggest that while the brand names on them vary, they're all coming from the same factory. That factory is only interested in innovating to the extent of copying the latest innovators but may be distributed by a brand name which can spend big money to get your attention. Again, I'm very reluctant to name names (and I'm not necessarily thinking of the brand names you might expect) but they range in price from as much as $250 to as low as $55 with only what I'd consider to be slight variations in the end product; an extra piece here, an omitted piece there. And I don't mean like the incidental similarity of two products made by two separate parties- I mean like the similarity between the 1990's Geo Prizm and the Toyota Corolla, or the Dodge Stealth and the Mitsubishi 3000GT. Like, they have different headlights but they're the same damn car, most of which came off the same assembly line.
(Also, I am aware that some of the North American brand products might actually be manufactured by "expert seamstresses" in eastern europe somewhere. I'm not talking about that.)
If you're getting impatient waiting for me to get to the point, here it is- it's not that these US / North American brands are simply competing with other small outfits overseas- rather, it's that some of that manufacturing is being shifted overseas where it is highly centralized and greatly homogenized. It's one thing if big brands like Tyr Tactical, Crye Preciaion, Velocity/ Mayflower. TACTICAL Assault Gear and LBT also compete with upstarts like Assault Weapons Systems, Arbor Arms, Ferro Concepts, Spiritus Systems, and SKD Tactical, who also compete with Condor and Emerson, Flyye and Lancer (commonly recognized airsoft brands) but when numerous big marketing budget brands start taking the easy, high-margin route with variants of the same overseas- made Slickster clone, you should start to take note that while all of them are attaching the perceived cache of their brand name to these products ( originating from likely the same factory) and hyping them up to you, at least one of them thinks they can sell you essentially the same item for $55 each and still squeeze out some kind of margin on them. That should alert you to the actual value of what you're buying, all of which is a really roundabout way of asking you "if you were going to spend $150 anyway on something that's probably worth about $50, why the hell didn't you just buy an Ares Arbor Minuteman with the elastic cummerbund? Or at least wait for the Slicksters or LV119's to be back in stock?"
https://shop.opticsplanet.com/221b-t...e-carrier.html
https://bulletproofzone.com/collecti...e-carrier-socc
https://bulletproofzone.com/collecti...-plate-carrier
https://lapolicegear.com/lapg-lvpc-l...e-carrier.html
https://lapolicegear.com/shellback-t...e-carrier.html
https://www.chasetactical.com/produc...-carrier-lvpc/
https://www.t3gear.com/t3-tomahawk-l...plate-carrier/
I found these with one search without really trying. Like, I wasn't even on google; I used DuckDuckGo.
I know I'm going to see a lot of "too long, didn't read" comments, but I found it interesting to write about.
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