I didn't want to ruin my favorite everyday hat by packing it in my suitcase, so I bought this hat as my sacrificial travel hat to use while hiking in Banff Canada.
It's surprisingly decent for the price:
- The brim is generously wider than I expected, so it should do a great job shading me from the sun, especially my ears as others have noted.
- The silver color I ordered is visually appealing.
- it's very lightweight.
Things to note:
- As others have noted, it comes folded in half inside a shockingly pencil-thin box. This causes permanent creases on opposite sides of the brim which has kind of a thin foam material feel.
- The brim has two seams joining two halves to form the hat. They should fold the hat in half along those two seams instead of folding it randomly, to prevent forming unsightly permanent creases in the smooth parts of the brim.
- The creases are not only unsightly, but it also ruins the structural integrity of the brim in those spots, so the brim is kind of floppy where the creases are instead of staying rigid and keeping its shape, which is too bad because they could have avoided this by simply folding along the seams instead.
- I tried putting the hat in the dryer for a short time along with a wet bath towel to try to "steam" out the creases...it helped to decrease the appearance of one of the creases, but not the other crease which looks pretty bad and causes that part of the brim to droop.
- I am a size 24" noggin, which this adjustable size hat is supposed to accommodate, but i found it to be almost uncomfortably tight. For the price, I'm just going to hope that it stretches out a bit to become more comfortable over time.
All things considered though, for the price of under ten bucks, one can't complain too much and it's pretty decent overall. I'd probably buy it again unless something better comes on the market at that same price point.