Foxwear Rain Pants vs Beyond "Cold Fusion"

Today I was looking at the differences between two soft shell rain pants I have and thought I'd write up a little comparative review.

One pair is called Cold Fusion from Beyond, aka the Stealth Commuting Rain Pants. The other is Foxwear Rain Pants.

They are both custom-made out of similar materials, but the pants from Beyond end up costing nearly twice as much.

The reality has been that I wear the Beyond Pants 100% of the time, and the Foxwear pants remain as a little-used backup pair. I tried loaning the Foxwear pants to a friend, but he hardly wore them either and gave them back.

It's the style that makes all the difference. The workmanship is great in both cases, and you basically get what you see in the photos on either website.

With the Foxwear pants, be prepared to look like Homosporticus. The whole design screams "sporty!"-- sweatpant-like fit with elastic waist and cuffs, reflective leg bands, velcro boot slits and differently sized cargo pockets patched on.

With Beyond, you choose some customizations right on their website. If you follow my route of adding two discrete cargo pockets and a rear pocket, the end result looks could like a pair of black dress pants.....that just happen to stretch like sweatpants and repel water too.

When I wore the Foxwear design to commute to work, I was compelled to change immediately upon arrival. With the Beyond design, I towel off any water that may have beaded on them on the back room, and then am totally comfortable to walk into the conference room and meet with a client.

Not only is the Beyond design appropriate for more social situations, the time and logistics of changing out of rain gear is cut out.

While neither offers the kind of waterproofing that will stand up to a deluge, in practice these soft shell fabrics are good enough for most cases.

You might conclude that since this is all custom work, a frugal option might be to ask Foxwear to create pants that are more in the Beyond style. The fact is that the Foxwear design is much simpler design of a single fabric, and the Beyond approach makes use of several fabrics and four zippers. For example, Beyond uses a thin material for their cargo pockets, making them sleek and subtle when they are empty.

By contrast, Foxwear uses the same thick fleece material of the pants in their pockets, creating a bolted-on look that causes the pockets to stand out.

Overall, I'm definitely sold on the "Stealth Commuting Rain Pants" concept and hope more competition appears for this. Even Beyond's price point is good value as part of a replacing a car, which can often cost $300/month.