POC Consort Dungarees – A Review Revisited

I like the idea. I still don’t like the colour, price or durability. Are there any cheaper alternatives used in other sports that would work on a bike?

S’scribers only!

What happened? I’m guessing they fell apart and are a complete waste of 6000 pounds.

What happened?

PayPal me a fiver and I’ll tell you.

Ignore Tom, he has expensive bike habits to maintain.

And the award for understatement of the year goes to @stwhannah

@sharkattack… Benji found something from a sailing company and popped them in Fresh Goods

Thanks, I knew there would be something, and at one tenth of the price! I bet they’re great for muddy uplift days.

when you consider the price of these I have to say. Nice one Hannah for the follow up review and pointing this out

See! I knew it! 😆

To be fair to POC, it seems they’ve taken the information graciously. Agreeing to replace under warranty is decent of them. It’s a shame something so expensive has needed this, as you’d expect quality control to be tighter.

I’d still not part with that much money for them, but I would no way use the ones Benji has been using. No taper, no good, in my humble opinion.

“And These obviously because I like the brand name”

@dangeourbrain – and presumably because you are under 8 years old, which is the largest size they do 🙂

I’ve had this happen with several pairs of waterproof cycling trousers unfortunately. The friction of my bum against the saddle coupled with water and mud means that this is pretty much an inevitable outcome. The only way to really deal with it properly is to employ some heavy duty waterproof fabric rather like the old Gore Tex Taslan material that used to be used on high friction areas such as shoulders by Berghaus. Mudguards make a difference too.

Cheers

Sanny

£450 for a pair of dungarees that aren’t up to the job? Ridiculous.

It’s funny how you read things about brands like Rapha being overpriced etc but they don’t even come close to stuff like POC. The other good thing is that their kit is actually fit for purpose!

Yeah, I’ve trashed three pairs of waterproof shorts / 3/4s over the years all in weeks of riding, I’ve given up on them as a concept, at least for mountain biking. None of them cost anything like £450 though. If you think about it, it’s hardly surprising. A load of weight bearing down on a gritty, concentrated contact patch with continuous movement between the two surfaces. My guess is that fabric ‘testing’ will have involved standard lab fabric abrasion tests, which use nothing like that level of pressure or, potentially abrasiveness if you factor in Peak grit slurry.

That said, for £450, I’d have expected POC to have done comprehensive pre-production ride-based, wear testing and have picked up on this before using customers as beta testers.

I wouldn’t touch these with a barge-pole. The idea of shelling out £450 knowing that something was likely to fail and then having to rely on a warranty process that might or might not come through for me just makes me shudder. The problem with getting stuff to test as a journalist is that even though you know the price of the item, there’s a visceral difference to having shelled out yourself no matter how much you try to imagine it.

Fair play for posting the follow-up, but surely the real conclusion is that you shouldn’t go near these. Call me cynical etc.

Now available in personalized versions?

If I only reviewed what I could afford, you’d probably not see much more than waterproof sock reviews!

Or maybe reviews of sensibly priced options rather than fashion victim stuff like Poc, Showers Pass and Santini?

If I only reviewed what I could afford, you’d probably not see much more than waterproof sock reviews!

That would be a splendidly dysfunctional editorial review policy and I’m not sure I ever suggested it. If you were going to be picky, I guess your criteria for review product should factor in affordability relative to your audience – I’m not sure this is SingleOligarchTrackWorld just yet – along with relevance of the product plus a dusting of aspiration thrown in. Oh, and commercial relevance I suppose.

Dunno where POC’s posh dungarees sit in all those, but could you maybe consider reviewing the new-ish Rapha trail stuff, which looks pretty good in an understated, Rapha-ish sort of way and isn’t insanely expensive either? For some reason it appears to have bypassed the entire mainstream mountain bike media – I’d hate to think that the reasons are commercial – and arguably is right in the ballpark for a chunk of STWers.

Kudos to Hannah for the follow up, but I’ve got yo say that this was the obvious outcome from the very beginning. Anyone who has used waterproof trousers sans mudguards know that the arse wears out. It’s obvious. Which is why spending an extra £350 on the additional accoutrements ( is that a tautology?) Is pointless.

I’ve had this happen with several pairs of waterproof cycling trousers unfortunately. The friction of my bum against the saddle coupled with water and mud means that this is pretty much an inevitable outcome.

Basically this.

your criteria for review product should factor in affordability relative to your audience – I’m not sure this is SingleOligarchTrackWorld just yet – along with relevance of the product plus a dusting of aspiration thrown in.

Based on whose income and purchasing patterns?

I’m paid under the UK average, but I ride all the time so spend money on decent kit. The gear I’m wearing to ride home tonight will total around somewhere around £500, and I’ll be riding a £5k full-sus bike. I live in a part of the country where the bulk of jobs are borderline minimum wage, yet pretty much every rider I see when riding will be kitted out something like me and riding bikes that won’t be described as cheap. Should STW reviews not be talking about the stuff that we wear just because YOU choose not to buy similar, for whatever reasons? And if we spend this much on bike stuff in this area, I’d guess that in more affluent areas the spend may be rather higher. (Albeit, we’ve got a very healthy population of enthusiastic and regular riders around here, being South Wales.)

It’s been made clear in this review that these dungarees are outliers. Mainly I find the balance of goods is about right. And to make it clear I won’t be buying them, or any other riding dungarees, because dungarees.

Should STW reviews not be talking about the stuff that we wear just because YOU choose not to buy similar, for whatever reasons

There seems to be an expectation that because aldi’s salopettes work they should be getting the same mention as the poc dungarees.
The lack of grasp that you’re paying £300 more so poc can advertise, sponsor, provide test kit for review and so on staggers me. Yes they pocket an extra £££ for sticking three big letters on the kit but the majority of the cost to the end user for buying branded is establishing that brand.

but could you maybe consider reviewing the new-ish Rapha trail stuff, which looks pretty good in an understated, Rapha-ish sort of way and isn’t insanely expensive either? For some reason it appears to have bypassed the entire mainstream mountain bike media – I’d hate to think that the reasons are commercial

Case in point, rapha mtb kit is remarkably reasonably priced, especially compared to their own road kit, yet its poorly advertised, doesn’t sponsor a pro team or race, not widely reviewed and broadly “bypassed the entire mainstream mountain bike media”. Those things aren’t unrelated. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it to be but this isn’t impartial investigative journalism, if Rapha or aldi don’t push their own kit the commercial media, in a more and more squeezed, less and less profitable market aren’t going to regularly go out and buy the stuff to test when the likely result is relatively few click throughs from people less likely to pay towards the running of the business (by following advertising, subscribing, clicking skim links etc).
DC rainmaker occasionally gets mentioned as an example here but he’s not reviewing aldi’s latest action cam either as that sort of kit doesn’t drive traffic, clicks and cash to his site.

In this context I take ‘Remarkably reasonably priced’ to mean not as ridiculously priced as I’d expected