GTM Bag Testing
Our bags are tough. Just like our customers.
How GTM Tests our Bags For Ultimate Safety and Durability
While we design our bags to be beautiful and fashionable, our handbags are inspired and designed with the ultimate goal of protecting and empowering every woman who carries one. That’s the main reason we exist: safety and empowerment for women. A big part of that commitment is making sure that our concealed carry bags can be used as intended in an instant. That means strong materials, rigorous testing and quick-draw experts giving us constant feedback. We employ not one but two levels of testing for every GTM bag in development: in-the-factory and in-the-field.
Factory Material Testing
Purses with broken straps, weak leather or stuck zippers are useless. Why should you spend your hard-earned money on a beautiful fashion accessory just to have it break?
Having been in the luggage business for 35 years, we know how important it is to test all our products at the factory before they hit the shelves and enter your home. We put our products through more rigorous testing than most. We stretch the leather, pull the strap, work the zipper again and again . . . we TRY HARD to break our handbags.
Have you ever dropped your purse on the ground? We do it. A lot. We fill every one of our new purse designs with 8-10 pounds of weight (the average weight of a woman’s purse), raise it up off the floor several feet and drop it on the hard ground. And we do that 2,500 times! We make sure the strap holds when the full weight is hung, we test that the metal rings don’t break on ground impact, and we evaluate how the leather performs after being slammed to a hard surface that many times.
Once a GTM bag passes those rigorous factory tests, it’s off to the experts.
Safety Testing By Industry Experts
While our factory testing is industry-leading, not every issue comes to light at the production level. Therefore, it’s critical we put all our products through additional testing, specifically the weapon compartment. To do that, we depend on the real experts in the field, including instructors who regularly train folks in the FBI and Navy Seals.
At GTM, we are proud to have notable experts take our products to task. These women and others like them put every GTM bag prototype to the real-world test, drawing from it hundreds of times with at least five different weapons, and wearing the bag multiple ways (because every woman wears a purse differently).
Our main goal in having these nationally recognized trainers test our bags is to make sure our users can achieve the fastest draw possible (the goal is a 2-second draw). It’s imperative with every design that nothing interfere with getting to the weapon compartment quickly. If the lining in the compartment is too loose, it can get in the way of grabbing the weapon. If the leather is too soft, it can fold over on top of the zipper to the gun compartment thereby blocking it. (P.S. we never use “average handbag zippers” on our GTM products! Knowing that the zipper to the gun compartment has to perform on a moment’s notice and can never get stuck or split open, we use only use nylon coils, never metal. One tooth out of alignment could be difference between life and death.)
After their extensive use of the bag over a long period of time (at least a month), GTM then receives a detailed report from our field testers. We learn what they liked about the bag and any concerns they may have so that we can fix it before distributing the product to the general public.
“If our testers find an issue, we immediately make a design change to fix it,” says our CEO Claudia Chisholm. “We want to hear from our consumers, too, if they find something that’s troublesome. We WILL react and change things immediately for all new production. This is what makes us different from any other company.”
GTM will ask our testers also to test a variety of non-lethal weapons starting later in 2019. What do you look for in a concealed carry handbag? Have you ever had to draw your weapon from your purse? Did you ever use a bag from another company that had design flaws? Tell us your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
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