The experience with Sigg

We all know Sigg bottles, whether we’ve disdained them for being over-priced or bought them to massage our fashionista-ness, there can’t be an outdoorsy person anywhere who wouldn’t recognise the Swiss aluminium can at a glance.  So this review isn’t really about the bottle itself, it’s an aluminium bottle that holds water well, nuff said!

But, what has occurred to me over the past week or two that I’ve been using the Sigg Emblem Black Touch for GearWeAre, is that there is a vast difference in the user experience, between cheap products and quality products.  A cheap product really does leave a nasty taste in your mouth sometimes when you compare it to a quality one.  This was brought home to me mostly when attempting to cut my small (compact & bijou M’Austin, compact & bijou), lawn with a knackered, cheap and nasty plastic bodied cylinder mower (I won’t name it to protect the guilty).  Cutting the lawn should not be that hard. But the simple pleasure of slurping cool refreshing water from my Sigg made the afternoon infinitely more bearable, and even enjoyable.

After that experience, the ridiculous to the sublime, I had a further look at the Sigg site, and bought myself one of the Sports-Caps that
replaces the familiar simple Sigg cap.  Sigg have recently expanded their range of caps and tops, all of them interchangeable, which is simple, yet excellent marketing and engineering.

The 3-stage-sports-cap I picked up is a really well designed piece of kit, with a lot of clever ideas that have obviously been picked up from
feedback and usage of other sports caps.

For a start, it can be locked closed, with a slight twist of the mouthpiece, and further, (as my girlfriend discovered when she pulled the mouthpiece open too harshly after a particularly strenuous yoga session), the mouthpiece can actually be completely removed for
cleaning.  This is achieved by a further rotation of the mouthpiece, and the two components are obviously well engineered to high tolerances, and there is even a silicon rubber seal between them to ensure the cap is watertight.

If I had to make any requests of Sigg, I’d suggest a bit of knurling around the outer edge, to aid getting the cap tight, a bit more knurling around the mouthpiece, to make the lock/unlock easier (if you use anything remotely sticky, or fill the bottle a little too tight the mouthpiece can sometimes stick), and I’d also suggest that all the plastic around the outer diameter of the cap isn’t really doing anything much, is it really necessary?  The internal rubber seal on my cap was a little out of shape, which might explain why it has leaked a little bit while being bounced around in my motorcycle top-box, but then, that’s a pretty harsh test.

For that matter, the top-box test has also revealed that the matt-finish to the “Touch” series bottles is pretty tough as well as being lovely and tactile.  I can see this bottle being used for many
years and lasting virtually forever.

Which brings me back to the difference between cheap and quality products.  It’s unlikely that a plastic bodied, simply engineered water bottle will last you a lifetime, but, come the zombie apocalypse, my Sigg will quite definitely be in the side pocket of my shoulder bag.  If nothing else, filled with water it’ll make a decent cudgel!

 Price: £17.99
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