Outward Dog Life Jacket for Dog Safety Vest Dog Jacket Dog Preservers Saver

Ordered this vest for our growing pup. Ordered a cheap one on purpose since we are not sure how big she will get. She quickly outgrew the medium (probably best for 25lbs and under). When she got to 30lbs she barely fit in it and it started tearing and fraying at all the seams. Ordered the large which she wears now and has plenty of room to grow in it. (She is about 33lbs now.) It is already starting to tear and fray at some of the seams, but hopefully it will hang on until the end of this season. I will say that the handle is pretty strong and the vest floats great and keeps her head out of the water. It is a good vest for short term or possibly for a dog that is calmer and not running around and swimming all the time. Also probably a good vest if you will not use it too often our pups are on the lake every weekend with us so their vests get a ton of use. When she is full grown I will buy her a Ruffwear vest like our other dog has they are expensive but for a good reason!

One more thing ships from China so don't expect it to get there quickly although both vests arrived about 2-3 weeks prior to the estimated date so that was good!

When I went looking to replace my Ruffwear vests that was getting pretty worn after 4 years, I decided to give these a shot since they seemed to look fairly similarly built from the pictures. I figured at the price the seller was asking that even if that lasted one season of play they would be easier on the pocketbook then buying 3 new Ruffwear vests for my 3 dogs. It probably should have been obvious from the price that these were Chinese knockoffs, and shipped directly from China. Surprisingly they shipped fairly quickly even from halfway across the world, I think they arrived about 2 weeks after I placed the order. Upon arrival I gave them a good once over, the colored fabric on the top is a cheap nylon, the stitching is sup-par and the bottom is a webbing, there is no closed cell foam along the belly for floatation like the Ruffwear vests. The first day out one of the vests got a good 3" rip in the nylon and all of them showed signs of the stitching unravelling, mostly wear the nylon meats the webbing along the sides. So at this point you're asking "Why didn't you return them?!" I really really thought about it, but at the time I didn't have the money to splurge on more lifejackets in the meantime and at this point I realized I was going to use them to pieces to give the most accurate review I could.

So here we are halfway through summer, out of all 3 vests ALL of them have multiple tears in the decorative nylon, with a couple of them having the closed cell foam sticking out. ALL of them has the webbing separated from the nylon by strips of 3-4". Another critique is the thickness of the closed cell foam: the Ruffwear vests are almost 1" thick, these vests are roughly half that... The last thing I had a problem with is the bottom webbing flaps have a big design flawthey wrap on each other using Velcro, and the rough side of Velcro is facing OUT, so the first time we went out my dogs underarms were very warn and bloody, and had bad scabs for a few days all on the same sides of their bodies. Once I figured out the vests were the culprits it was easy to take a piece of Velcro from the fabric store and cover up the exposed scratchy Velcro parts. But this is something that could have easily been noticed and remedied at the factory if that had any clue what they were doing.

If these things have ANY redeeming factor whatsoever, the carry handles ARE stitched on very well. So far there have been a few occasions were we've had to pull a dog out of the water onto a boat/dock/whatever and none of the handles have ripped. My dogs weigh from 45-75#s respectively.

So final thoughtsif you need a vest for a SINGLE use, then sure, feel free to order these. Me personally I will never buy anything that isn't Ruffwear again.

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