Persistent Consistency in Quality and Service - Propper and BDU.com:
You will note that there is advertising on our page. In fact, all of our websites have advertising on them. These ads support hosting our website and make
continuing our efforts worth while.
The simple clicking of an ad gives us some sort of income, from a penny to more than a dollar. If someone stayed within the "cookie range" and actually purchased
something from an ad they started from our site, we might actually earn even more. We do not earn enough to quit the day jobs, but as long as the income covers
the expense of what we do, we are happy, but this note isn't about that, it is about two companies that we have been dealing with for over a year now.
The first is Propper. Propper is an authorized manufacturer of field uniform style clothing. You know these as BDU's, ACU's and ABU's. When we created
ETE, we considered a uniform. The uniform that we would choose needed to meet a variety of purposes for two reasons, we are cheap, and
we don't like pissing money away on crap you can't use anywhere else.
Over the course of our testing, we picked up four types of BDU uniforms, black with hook and loop and a zipper fly, black with buttons, "Urban", based on the Woodland
design but in black grey and white, and dark grey. Urban and dark grey also had buttons.
All of the items we had been testing came from www.bdu.com. BDU.com is a phenomenal company that provided service that simply shocked us in speed and efficiency.
It has been as if they are across the street and hand delivered packages to us when we order them.
For the reasons of quality, efficiency and service, ETE offers this unpaid endorsement of Propper and BDU.com!
This is what we discovered:
First, we loved all the items as far as quality of build and comfort.
That said, we did not like hook and loop. We liked the idea of a zipper, but the hook and loop is bad for one handed usability and confidence that the pocket is properly
secured, which is stressful.
So, we are down to three options, black, dark grey (both in "Battle Rip" and buttons), and "Urban" with buttons and in Cotton Twill (the only fabric option).
Right to the bottom line here - the black BDU's are great, but they show "stuff". If you've seen the "Hayden's Cats" website (and you should have!), you'd know that there
are twelve cats walking around the office. Even though the office is very clean, even a little hair will find your black pants and make friends with the other hair that already
landed on you!
Let's skip over to the Urban BDU. We absolutely LOVE this design. It looks like the Woodland pattern, but in black, grey and white. It is simply a blast to wear this BDU!
You can wear it a lot of places that we thought might not be a best place to wear them, the only place that we found so far that we would not wear them is on a video
shoot or into court.
So, what we did was to accept both the Urban and the dark grey!
The Urban design is our everyday wear around the office and to run errands. The dark grey is what we would wear to shoot video, or go to court.
We left out a paragraph... We wear the BDU pants with a collarless shirt without pockets. You can think "t-shirt", which you could wear and be fine, but what we wear is
a little classier and looks great. We'll update information a bit later on about that. We do have the "shirt" for each uniform as well and again, we'll chat about that later.
The dark grey hides everything very well! They are dark grey and look more formal than the black (especially since you don't see hair!). Most colors will still go with the
dark grey. We are still playing with colors that run well with the Urban BDU's and have just acquired some fresh Urban ones for color testing - they already passed quality,
wear and color fade resistance tests!
Our readers should also hit those menu keys to the left and check out the Rank and Membership pages of ETE. We'll discuss more about ETE in other posts.
For now, know that Propper BDU's are very high quality and that ETE officially endorses both Propper brand and BDU.com as solid companies with which to do
business with.
We fully endorse the quality of Propper products and the quality of service (and price) of bdu.com.
