Gear

Grey Gear – Does It Have a Future?

‘Some’ Shades of Grey.

The issue in the gear world is that grey hasn’t really gained quite enough traction for the key materials (e.g. uniform nyco, 500D cordura) to be produced in the quantities in which other colours are manufactured. The various brands also haven’t really agreed with each other on what actual pantone ‘grey’ should be when it comes to their products.

Bear in mind I’m not saying this is world shattering issue because it isn’t, it was just an interesting point I noted when I mounted the depicted pouches to a belt. It’s also been something like 5 years since I bought my first item of tac kit in grey and I still don’t have a complete loadout on account of lack of products in the market that actually fit in with what I specifically want.

Now, if you buy Coyote Brown or Multicam for example, you’ve got a very good chance that the colours will closely match across a wide variety of manufacturers and at a range of price points. It’s a bit trickier with Ranger Green because only a few brands offer it and the only ones I’ve seen to use what I would call the truly correct colour tend to be pricey. Even then it’s a drop-down option that the manufacturers themselves struggle to keep consistent between batches, but grey suffers from even greater issues in this regard as you can see below.

Here, from left to right, we have the following:

Grey Ghost Gear Accommodator pistol pouch ‘Grey’
High Speed Gear TACO LT ‘Wolf Grey’
FirstSpear MultiMag pocket ‘Manatee Grey’
FRV Tailoring Shooter’s belt ‘MET Grey’

I’ll let you in on a little insider secret in that the FS colour isn’t meant to be any different to other wolf greys, it’s just the the certain people who requested the kit do a lot of splishing and splashing. As you can see however, the colour variances are pretty stark, going from super light on the GGG cordura through to the much darker FRV webbing.

Whether these inconsistencies will ever be eliminated I’m unsure, because the market just isn’t very big for this shade of gear. Black kit always sells in quantities because of US police usage, even though grey is a much better solid when it comes to actual camouflage and concealment. When I tried to track down some BFG pouches in grey during 2019 I really struggled to find any stock and it seemed to be discontinued, though I don’t have solid info on that. You will also note that FS don’t offer this colour in most of their product line for the commercial market.

It’ll be interesting to see whether grey gear is still around in 3 years time or whether it fades in to the background after a brief spike in interest as we’ve seen happen with the ATACS, Kryptek and Pencott camo families.

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