‘Custom Cryes’ and Where to Get Them

First off, to cover the basics for anyone who’s interested, you want to head to this group and sign up:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/807151342686715/

Be VERY sure to take the time and go through the pinned post as well as the actual albums under the photos section. Between those things you’ll be able to answer the vast majority of questions you might have. Roman is a one man army in terms of all the manufacturing and running the online side of the business, so don’t go flooding him with a ton of ‘How much?/How long?/What camos?’ questions when all that stuff is pretty well covered already.

To cover the absolute bare bones, the materials used throughout are all either the same or extremely close to those used by Crye and it’s the same story with the stitching work. There have been plenty of Roman’s items used on deployments by various military folks out there so it’s more than up to the task and is overall much better quality than standard issue military apparel (PCS, ACU etc). The sizing (certainly with the G3 replicas) mimics Cryes’ spot on so use their sizing chart or compare against a Crye item to find your size. I don’t have any of the custom ACs so I can’t comment there but my scratch-built G3s all fit just fine and as they should. From placing your order to receiving the items you’re looking at a wait somewhere in the region of 4-8 weeks very roughly speaking, that’s my experience in the UK anyway. The shipping part of that will take around 2 weeks on average I find.

This particular shirt came about as a result of an issue I had finding something in PenCott Camouflage Badlands to compliment the Husar EXO trousers that I’ve posted here previously. Unfortunately at this point, from what I generally see, GreenZone is really the only PenCott pattern being made in quantity by any of the high quality brands and in a cut/style that I personally like. That meant the commercial market wasn’t an option for precisely the item I was after. Annoyingly I can’t remember where I first found out about Roman and his work, but fortunately my standard never-ending gear quest does serve me well in terms of hunting down folks like him who can make stuff that no standard manufacturer is making.

As with purchasing any custom or scratch built tac gear I can’t urge you enough to know EXACTLY what you want when contacting the maker. They cannot read minds and they do not know the image you have in your head – make absolutely no assumptions about what they will do because there’s zero guarantee it’ll be the same as what you’re picturing. If you’re not fussed about details then sure feel free to be vague, but if you want a CB torso instead of a Tan one you must say so. If you want green velcro fields on something instead of black, or a certain colour of thread to be used in the stitching or a specific colour zip then again you must be sure to specify all of those details and this is of course by no means an exhaustive list.

Roman can make small deviations form the Crye templates such as the solid loop fields shown here on a G3 cut shirt, he can also fairly easily remove features and most of my combat shirts from him do not feature the pen loop on the left shoulder pocket for example. He cannot make entire new types of garment though just for your 1 custom request and with the volume of product he’s making the catalogue is fairly locked in, so again as I mentioned earlier be sure to look through the picture albums in the linked group to see what is actually available and manage your expectations within those boundaries. That said however, he does offer a good range of apparel to suit various tastes as well as lots of chest rigs, small packs, placards, pouches and other small cordura items so it’s not like the catalogue is small and certainly not once you factor in the camo options available. In fact in my opinion for a single man operation the variety in choice is frankly staggering.

I own quite an amount of his product at this point to include a variety of combat apparel, a couple of field cut shirts and some cordura kit, all with varying levels of customisation and all of which I’m very happy with, especially given the prices and the upper-end quality of workmanship. His English is not 100% perfect but infinitely better than any of my other languages and if you simply posses the very small amount of patience necessary to allow him to make what you’re after, you’re essentially guaranteed to be very happy with the end result. Certainly given the fact that he’s one of the only people on the planet who offers the services that he does.