The Best Dog Collar | Reviews by Wirecutter

Top pick

Brightly reflective, personalized, and backed by Orvis’s satisfaction guarantee, the collar comes in a variety of colors and sizes.

The Orvis Personalized Reflective Collar is personalized with your pet’s information, so they can still be identified if their tags get lost. It’s also reflective enough to be seen day or night, easily attaches around a dog’s neck, remains steadfastly in place, and is constructed of strong enough stuff to weather every durability test we could throw against it. It’s more expensive than many other collars, but with Orvis’s 100% satisfaction guarantee, we think it’s worth the cost.

The reflective material is easy to see. The Orvis is covered in reflective material with the pet’s name and your phone number custom embroidered large enough to be read at 30 paces. The reflective strip lit up like an LED when hit with a flashlight or headlight—clearly visible even with a dog whose fur obscured the collar.

It features sturdy, durable hardware. The collar’s plastic clasp was smooth, strong, and snapped and unsnapped easily—and as much as we pulled on it, the Orvis held steady. Its rustproof D-ring is thin enough to easily attach ID tags and constructed so strongly that we tugged at it so hard that we snapped the ID tag ring. (This would be a good time to recommend not skimping on the ring that hangs on the D-ring.) And if you have trouble attaching tags due to arthritis or other issues, or if the attached tags become lost, your contact information is permanently etched into the collar itself.

Sonic-welded seams leave fewer places for dirt to hide. The Orvis collar is constructed with durable sonic-welded seams more often used in the construction of items that are subjected to extreme weather conditions year-round like tents, boat tarps and awnings. This process involves fusing the material to itself using a combination of high-frequency vibrations and extreme pressure to produce a solid seam without the need for adhesives or thread. The lack of stitching also means there’s fewer places for dirt and grime to get stuck, so the collar is easier to scrub clean.

It’s easy to clean and holds its shape. The collar is made of soft and flexible polyester that maintains its shape and feel even after hours of being submerged in water, left to dry, and then resubmerged for another day. Caked on mud comes off cleanly after a good scrub and neither stains the Orvis nor lingers in the weave. After just a couple of hours in the sunlight, it’s dry and ready to wear—no shrinking or changes in texture.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It might hold onto some smells. After soaking in a bucket full of vinegar and water solution for a day, the Orvis collar smelled slightly, where other collars like the Ruffwear came out smelling clean. After a quick cleaning with Dawn dish soap, the odor was hardly noticeable, so it’s not a huge deal.

It’s not as reflective as it could be. The painted-on reflective coating wasn’t the brightest we tested (that was the GoTags), but our test dogs’ collars were quickly spotted on nighttime walks through the Hollywood Hills.

It’s expensive. The Orvis is one of the pricier collars we looked at, but with the lifetime guarantee and the high quality of construction, we think it’s worth the extra money.