Fall Gear : MBO Gloves FirstUse

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When we posted a roundup of the Fall Gear last week, we hadn’t planned on writing an article just about the Maroon Bell Outdoor gloves, but we got enough questions about them that, instead of responding to them individually, we decided that a FirstUse writeup was warranted.

Maroon Bell Outdoor

As mentioned in the Fall Gear Roundup, four-year old Maroon Bell Outdoor makes stuff that satisfies the tastes of the city dweller as well as the needs of country denizen. Of course, some fortunate RainyDayMagazine readers are both 🙂

Spanning the city/country spectrum is no easy juggling act. It is not just a matter of design, but also a commitment to quality and price. We think MBO does an excellent job in balancing the two, and their Buffalo Leather Gloves are a prime example.

The gloves have:

• Full grain water buffalo leather;
• Brass snaps and reinforced stitching; and
• Conductive pads on the thumb and index finger.

These buffalo leather gloves are great for keeping your hands warm on a top-down, Fall-in-New-England drive, but are built to take whatever you want to throw at it. We just got them, so we have been “gentle”…a little gardening work here and there for now. We’ll “step it up” over time and see how they fare.

These gloves are tough because they are made with full grain water buffalo leather. Water buffalo hide has an epidermal layer that is three times thicker than cow hide. Additionally, the tanning process does not stretch the hide, resulting in a product that is thicker and more resistant to tearing. Gloves made with it are tough as nails and really, really, durable.

Having worn/used them for three weeks, our impressions are that:

• They got more comfortable with each wear;
• They clean up easily;
• Their conductive tips works well for scrolling and tapping of larger buttons (phone dialing, app selection, etc), but not for “fine” selection or keyboard use; and
• They are great looking without the fuss.

The gloves were a bit stiff out of the box, but Maroon Bell Outdoor assured us that the  leather softens over time and will stretch to fit (they are intentionally sized to be snug). We will post an update once they have had a chance to “settle in.” Hopefully, these will indeed fit like, uh, a glove 🙂

The one small enhancement we would like to see in a future version is the addition of a small loop on each glove so that we can clip them together and attach them to a belt loop. We would HATE to lose one because we didn’t have a good jacket pocket to put them in…

Links to items mentioned:

• Maroon Bell Outdoor gloves