I'm looking for an armored jacket and armored pants. I don't want to pay too much, but want good protection. Has anyone heard of Joe Rocket gear? I really like the look of this jacket:
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Unfortunately, I'm lanky, so standard female stuff doesn't always fit me well.
Does anyone know where I could find this brand gear locally to try it on? How about suggestions for other gear brands?

I'm not a fan of Joe Rocket Gear mostly because they cater to the squids in a big way. It's typically mid-range gear. I haven't read any crash reports on it but as long as it has elbow, back and shoulder CE armor and reasonable stitching it'll likely be better in a crash than the old Hein Gericke.

I would focus on pants first however. The old leather jacket is still plenty good and I've seen two guys fall hard on them and walk away with just bruises.

I'm looking at getting both pants and a jacket, and want them to be able to zip the two together, and have them not look too mismatched.

yea, exactly.

I'm just saying that if you can't get both at the same time, get the pants first since you've got access to a decent jacket.

But if you can get both, definitely do.

I like that it has an extended back, since the other ones seemed a bit short. Maybe I'll see if Heyser Cycle Center has some of the female stuff I can try on.
Honestly, I don't much care who they cater to. Me wearing it will make the squids look bad.

You might want to check out Olympia which had a fairly good women's range last time I looked. Bob's carries them. If you find something you like there are good discounts and closeouts to be had now that we're getting to the end of "fair weather rider" season

There is nothing wrong with Joe Rocket gear. I have a jr jacket and boots from when I started riding in '08. Since then they've really upped their game from what I've seen.

As to who they market to, who cares. Get what fits you within your budget. Coleman Powersports has their stuff in stock. I'm going there today to order that damn Sena torture device so I will price that jacket for you.

Consider a tour master leather jacket as well to get a longer riding season.

River road is a good company for women riding gear. Revzilla and motorcycle gear.com has sale on jackets etc.

ICON also makes good looking women gear, but they are abit on the pricey side. I would suggest possibly going with armored jeans and a leather jacket.

http://www.revzilla.com/motorcycle/river-road-womens-ca...

180 I think this looks good.

That River Road jacket does not have CE or TF armor, it uses something called EVA Foam Armor which I have never heard of but seems, based on a quick google search, to be used in crafting.

Has anyone heard of EVA Foam Armor or seen any crash test reports?

Generally speaking you want to have something with CE or TF armor in the shoulders, elbows and back.

For pants you want something that has CE or TF armor cover the knees and hip bones.

Most low to mid-range jackets will come with a foam back protector which you then swap out for a real CE back protector.

Who a manufacturer markets to matters because that influences where they spend their dollars and effort.

For instance, Harley markets to Harley riders. Corner clearance, braking, acceleration, etc are secondary to other considerations for the market they target.

So it does matter. A lot. The primary point to gear, the reason we wear it, is to survive a crash with minimal injuries.

Back in the day, Joe Rocket marketed to the squid poseur crowd which means they marketed to people that are not very knowledgeable, discerning or technical. So there was no point in building safer more competent and serious gear for them. "All show, no go".

I have the same problem with many of the producers of "stylish" gear. I just have no confidence that it'll do well in a crash.

I haven't been able to find crash test reports on Joe Rocket after doing a bit of searching. Back in the day, they were pretty bad.

But, as Josh mentions, it looks like maybe they have stepped up their game a bit as I'm not seeing the same quantity of laughably bad "gear" that they used to sell. When comparing jacket prices, you'll need to remember that some include more substantial back protection than others. I haven't looked at this jacket, but comparing the descriptions to analogous TourMaster descriptions I would suspect the back pad they include will not be adequate.

I wonder how much they have to spend for the silly Honda logo they've put on there.

As Duncan mentions, Olympia makes gear for serious riders. Wasn't Ali wearing Olympia gear?

RevZilla has a large selection and very knowledgable staff who love to help. Drop them a note with what you're thinking and they can make suggestions. The also have a lot in stock in their store (maybe worth a day trip ride up to their store in Philly???). As to the Joe Rocket thing...my warm weather pants are JR and so are my current gloves and both are terrific. It's the quality of materials, contruction, and fit that count. I also have 2 FirstGear jackets (including the Kathmandu -waterproof- that is my most worn), and Alpinestars leather. Every manufacturer has made some crap, and even Icon makes some good stuff. Keep an open mind and get quality that fits.

Yermo, My Kathmandu and Aplinestars gear have EVA pads. Next ride you can pull them out and take a look. Great stuff...light and flexible until impact.

Yes, Ali loves her Olympia jacket and it was an absolute steal for $35 on the clearance rack at Bobs a few years ago. Not sure what type of armor it has, though.

I've never associated JR with quality in any measure, which is why I'm so negative about them and similar brands. But it looks like it's a case of the world having changed around me and, once again, me not noticing. Back in the day, which as I think about it was quite a bit longer ago than I thought, when I was last exploring gear, JR IMHO was unacceptably bad across the board. I guess I need to take a fresh look to see how they've stepped up their game.

This has gotten me thinking more about branding, positioning, trust and how these affect engineering decisions. It dawned on me that early on in the development of a market brand matters because there are substantive differences between manufacturers. Mercedes Benz used to build substantially better cars than just about anyone else. That was their real brand. You paid your money and had the trust that the car was going to solve your problem better than a car produced by someone else. And it did, because it was a Mercedes and that brand meant something about the qualities of the product.

But as market forces and economies of scale come into play and the market matures, substantive differences between manufacturers slowly disappear. Brand at that point begins to degrade into "style", for which I have little use. This is a problem that Mercedes is facing because we have gotten to the point where most cars are "good enough", even cars made in Korea. Once you get to this point, it really no longer matters who makes a given thing because there are few technical differences and it just becomes a matter of "identifying personally" with a given "style". This is the negative side of "branding".

I suspect that's what's happening in the motorcycle gear market. Have we gotten to the point where most gear, even from the Hyundai's of the market, is "good enough" and I haven't noticed?

I was thinking about bikes in this regard. I honestly can't tell you that I understand any real substantive differences between the big three Japanese manufacturers. They don't really have much of a separate identity in my mind. Kawasaki, edgy. Suzuki, fast. Honda, timid. Maybe? I do however still perceive a real difference between them and BMW. Somehow BMW has not allowed their "brand" to degrade into a "style", yet. Maybe this is why they continue to produce quirky yet extremely functional designs so that they are not, substantively, a cookie cutter commodity?

So when I say brand matters, I am saying, by proxy, that quality matters. But if the world has changed and there is no substantive difference between manufacturers, then who ever builds whatever no longer matters and the value of brand disappears.

This is one part of getting old that really sucks; you get a handle on a topic and then the world completely changes but you don't realize that your understanding is out of date.

I like to paint a greyer picture. Let's not dump style and function as mutually exclusive. While one may bend to function over form or form over function it is a spectrum not a extreme.

Inbetween these variables are things on the spectrum that is subjective of one side to another. Is comfort a stylist element or a function element. Then we argue what is comfort for each individual in regard to motorcycle gear?

Perceptually our relation to what is stylistic and what is function is also a matter of personal use and experience. To define such variable as the law is a bit of personal biases.

What is necessary is best d etermine by the individual. Simply put. I find a lot of movies boring and regugitated bs from times before. But other younger people do not. Am I right ? No. Am I wrong? I would be if I discount the importance of what other value

LOL, I have to take you for a ride in my Hyundai Genesis. Mercedes has not been building the best cars for years now. They imploded in quality about 10 years ago and have been struggling to recover. Toyota, once the crown jewel of build quality, has not held the top position for some time. Memory works both ways: you remember Mercedes as a quality brand probably from their cars of the 80's through the mid to latter 90's (versus the crap they produced at the turn of the century); and you're thinking of Hyundai from when they built vomitous little cars. Neither generalization is true today.

Your comment "most cars are 'good enough', even cars made in Korea" had me laughing. A substantial number of cars made in Korea today are built far better than cars from Japan or Europe. When we were car shopping in 2009 I looked at Lexus, BMW (had one, liked it), Audi, Volkswagon, Cadillac (like the CTS-V), etc. A friend of mine said " I know you aren't brand fixated, you should check out the Genesis". We did, and we bought it. It is both human nature and the wonderful job that marketing sciences does that has us equate branding with a meaning beyond the name of the company

Religion and Brand Preference are amazingly close, and it could be easily argued that they are in fact the same. A devout person will defend their religion based almost entirely on the dogma of their church and a set of historical documents outlining past achievement and presented in a particular way to elicit boith response and a sense of belonging. Or is that marketing? It can be hard to tell the difference (hint, there isn't a difference). Thus, the feelings and strong preferences you may have towards BMW, Mercedes, or Michelin are in fact the same that a fundamentalist Christian has towards Jesus and the Bible. Even the "surprise" that other brands which you may have previously thought "inferior" has a direct parallel in religion: "Wow, Jews/Christians/Muslims/Agnostics/Atheists/Wiccans/Etc DON'T eat their young? Who knew?"

A lot of really smart people spend a lot of really substantial money, time, and research making sure that we feel exactly as we are supposed to about the brand images being created. That is why sports car manufacturers have started developping ways to create better engine sounds (BMW actually "plays" nice engine and exaust noise through the car's stereo), and why Mercedes uses heavy doors even though high-streangth steels and composits would be stronger and lighter (a hallmark of a "well built" Mercedes is the vault-like sound and heft of the door closing, though us engineers know that has nothing whatsoever to do with how strong or capable the door is...right?).

Brand and Market sciences are really cool, in a "let's make the bald monkey dance" kind of way. Fun stuff.

Yea, I need to do a better job of framing things. I was actually thinking back to the '50's and '60's with the Mercedes comment when differences in auto manufacturers were much more pronounced and you could actually buy truly horrible auto-mobiles. These days you are unlikely to buy a car that will not function. Back in the day, in this case 50 years ago, that was not the case.

I was also specifically thinking about the ascendancy of Hyundai, which I've recently read about. But that makes my point. Cars are now complete commodities. It's very hard to buy a car that isn't "good enough" to get you around. It reduces to whatever your preference is. Sure maybe the windows fail, or you get an engine code, but in general cars now a days regardless of manufacturer are not actively dangerous.

My comments on gear, which I did not frame as clearly as I should, is from the perspective not of "preference" or brand disloyalty but from the apparent misunderstanding that JR gear is no longer technically insufficient.

Back in the day (10+ years ago?), and mostly what I had been basing my thinking on, was that I had been told by several sources, but did not verify myself, that JR gear was so technically inferior that it tended to disintegrate in crashes. In other words, it was actively insufficient for the task at hand when compared to other options available. So my comments were not about brand preference in the modern sense, but from the perspective that that brand did not meet minimum technical requirements. There have been so many other brands out there that produce adequate gear that I never had occasion to loop back around and re-evaluate.

I suspect this is true of many "brands" that I do business with. There isn't enough time in a life to do careful evaluation of everything.

But we are now in a market of commodities which I had missed.

This is the same problem we had in my own little company, . In the early days, we were one of very few products on the market that actually worked. We sold like crazy because of a simply technical superiority, which in retrospect is probably one of the worst things that could have happened. We didn't understand the forces changing around us nor did we understand how the market was evolving and things were moving towards commoditization.



Yea, once what a brand reduces to commodity then the brand just becomes the name of the company and that's when brand science takes over.

Hyundai has done an excellent job distancing itself from it's previous reputation of producing technically insufficient cars. It's quite impressive as they really are creating some interesting vehicles these days. I read one article predicting their break into the luxury market.

<p class="fv-error">User not found</p>Religion and Brand Preference are amazingly close, and it could be easily argued that they are in fact the same. A devout person will defend their religion based almost entirely on the dogma of their church and a set of historical documents outlining past achievement and presented in a particular way to elicit boith response and a sense of belonging. Or is that marketing? It can be hard to tell the difference (hint, there isn't a difference). Thus, the feelings and strong preferences you may have towards BMW, Mercedes, or Michelin are in fact the same that a fundamentalist Christian has towards Jesus and the Bible. Even the "surprise" that other brands which you may have previously thought "inferior" has a direct parallel in religion: "Wow, Jews/Christians/Muslims/Agnostics/Atheists/Wiccans/Etc DON'T eat their young? Who knew?"