About Us
About ULgear
We're Jack and Paul. We met at school in West Lothian about a decade and a half ago and somehow never stopped being pals. We're now floating around Edinburgh and Fife, and like a lot of people, we got into hiking properly during covid because there wasn't much else going on.
It should've stopped at "nice hobby." It didn't. We started weighing things. Then we started weighing each other's things. Then we got into MYOG (making your own gear) because the stuff we wanted either wasn't sold in the UK or cost stupid money. We made some bad gear. We made some alright gear. Eventually we made some stuff we actually wanted to keep using.
That's where ULgear came from. No grand plan, just two pals who got a bit too into it.
What we make
Pegs, mats, guyline. The boring small stuff. We started here because honestly, this is where most "ultralight" gear falls over.
Your tent might be light but if your pegs are 25g each, what was the point.
Speaking of which: most carbon fibre pegs out there use cheap carbon, which means they have to be made bigger and chunkier so they don't snap. Big pegs are great until they hit a rock and stop dead. We use better carbon, which costs more, but means we can make them smaller, small enough to slip past rocks into actual soil instead of just bouncing off them.
Our 50g foam mat is properly 50g too, not "50g if you don't count the bit we forgot."
We're not trying to be clever. Just trying to do the small stuff honestly
What we reckon
"Ultralight" has been so overused it's basically meaningless now.
Brands slap it on 1.4kg tents and sleeping bags that weigh more than your water.
We're starting from the bottom up, pegs, then mats, then whatever's next because if you actually want a light pack, every bit matters.
You should buy the product, not the brand. We're two folk doing this around real jobs, testing stuff on actual UK trails (usually wherever in Scotland we've got a free weekend), and we'd rather you bought something because it works than because we wrote nice words about it.