AyeGear are a Scottish company that make garments for travel – meaning that they have many pockets to store gadgets and other things when you’re on the go.

Being a gadget nerd I was really interested in getting their H13 hoodie – 13 pockets including one for the iPad, a see through pocket for phones (you can use the phone whilst it’s still in the pocket!) and plenty of places to keep other things like portable device chargers, cables etc.

Being my usual impatient self, I ordered it from Amazon using next day delivery and it arrived this morning to I could try it out.

Here’s the quick review: Don’t buy it. It’s rubbish.

Here’s the slightly longer review…

First of all, as a hoodie, it’s decent enough and keeps you warm. The zips seem fairly decent and most of it is well made. What’s more, it’s comfortable.

The first problem is their sizing. If you usually buy L size clothing, buy XXL from AyeGear. Around the top it fits fairly snuggly, but soon gets uncomfortable when you start filling the pockets. Around the bottom where it’s sort of elasticated, it’s too tight even at the XL size I ordered.

Next of all is the quality of some of the pockets. The card holder on the inside right has material so thin, it surely cannot last a reasonable amount of time. This is the same with the zip pocket on the outside left – far too thin.

The Amazon page where you can buy this item from, states it has a built in lanyard. This is a very loose definition of the term lanyard – it’s a piece of fabric attached to the outside pocket with a press-stud button.

The inside see-through phone pocket can indeed fit an iPhone 5S with a case on it and as promised, you can use your phone without removing it from the pocket. The only problem here is that the see-through panel is frosted which means text is very difficult to read. If they had have made the panel completely transparent, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

Lastly, the image of the H13 on the Amazon website has headphones around the neck. This gave me the impression that it would have a headphone wire tidy system, just like the older H12 does. This was something I’ve been looking for to allow me to leave the earphones in the hoodie for convenience. Does the H13 have this feature? No. It’s gone. Some ‘upgrade’ that is!

As a hoodie, it’s comfortable and warm enough, but for £65 I can buy two or more warm and comfortable hoodies. The bells the whistles that are advertised by AyeGear are a bit of a fail. There are plenty of positive reviews about their clothing on the internet, but I’m afraid I just don’t agree with them.

So, my hoodie is now packaged back up and about to be returned to Amazon. This is the first time I’ve ever returned something that I’ve bought online (well, apart from that time I ordered a hair clipper set and was sent an Epilator by accident!). My impatience means though that I’ve lost the £8 I spent on next day delivery. Lesson learnt.

So, my search for gadget friendly clothing goes on. I hear Scottevest are pretty good, but they don’t ship from the UK and I’m not really up for spending extra money on import duty and international shipping. Any recommendations?

UPDATE 1 (19/02/2014): Amazon do in fact refund postage charges which is great. I also received by refund within a couple of days so hats off to Amazon for their speedy response.

UPDATE 2 (20/02/2014): AyeGear have kindly taken the time to write to me to respond to my points above. Whilst I’m not in the habit of publishing personal correspondence, what I will say is that they have taken what I’ve said on board and have been keen to address what I’ve said. I may not rate this hoodie, but their customer service seems to be very good. If I get my hands on any more AyeGear products in the future I’ll make sure to get another review up on here. If you want to have a look at their product line, check out the AyeGear website.