We have been chuggin’ along here at Blue Collar for a little over a year. Whenever you start something new like this, naivety is often a problem. So you make stupid mistakes, ask stupid questions and often stumble along until you start figuring out how things work.

In our naivety, we decided that when we reviewed products we would test them hard and long. Take them on a lot of rides in a lot of different conditions. Because, we figured, if we are going to recommend a product, we need to know it’s gonna hang in there for the long term. I want to know how hard a helmet can get smacked before cracking. I want to know that not only will a base layer keep me warm, but it won’t start unraveling after a month of using and washing it. And I sure as heck want to know that a bike will hold up and perform under a variety of conditions. So we take our time reviewing. We take them on hard courses and easy courses. Technical trails, muddy loops, fast runs and anything else we can get our hands on.

Well over the last couple of months, as I learn more about how things really work in the industry, I am finding that this isn’t what goes on in most cases. I’ve run across a couple of bike reviews where the reviewer admitted to only taking the bike on a couple rides. I’ve heard rumors of different magazines getting paid to review a product (this one really pissed me off. How can you honestly say you are giving an unbiased review when you are getting slid a stack of cash for your opinion?) and other publications only reviewing products once the company has purchased advertising with them (which is just as bad in my opinion).

This was made clear to me recently when we were talking to a certain bike manufacturer about reviewing a bike for them and they would only allow us, at most, a month to review their bike. Unless I lived on this bike for that month there is no way we could give an honest review. So we turned them down. We’ve already had people tell us they have bought bikes based on our recommendation and the last thing we are going to do is compromise that trust just because some company says “that’s not how other people do it.”

So in the past I figured it was understood that we beat the crap out of the stuff over a long period of time and that we don’t get paid to do reviews. But now I know that’s something that makes us stand apart from others in the industry. Should it be any other way?