The Best Gear for Your Go Bag

When we originally published this guide, we investigated a couple of preassembled bags but dismissed them in favor of building your own due to the preassembled kits’ poor-quality contents. Since then, the go bag market has expanded significantly, and we decided that it was time for a reevaluation. We understand that not everyone has the means or patience to build their own bag: Even with our less expensive backpack recommendation, the kit we’ve outlined above costs around $550 if you’re starting from scratch (but again, hopefully many of the listed items are things you already have hanging around the house).

Our hope was that we might find a “good enough” preassembled bag at a lower price, one that a buyer could build upon via customization; such an option would both satisfy the nervous itch of immediacy and have plenty of room in the bag left over for upgrading and personalization.

We looked at six popular preassembled bags, each designed to last for 72 hours, serving one person up to a family of four, with prices ranging from $135 to $590. Unfortunately, we came away disappointed again. Each of these bags will keep a person fed and hydrated for three days, but the few that left room for customization had little of it, and any number of the included items might fail. Aside from adding to the risk factor, something like a broken flashlight can cause a lot of anxiety, and keeping stress levels down is a key factor in getting through any kind of emergency. Several of the bags we looked at arrived with damaged contents, but each company offers both refunds and exchanges.

We conducted an exercise in which we timed how long it took to find and remove a first aid kit from a go bag and then clean and dress a small imaginary cut. For each of the preassembled bags, the time averaged around a minute and a half, but using the bag we’d packed ourselves with a quality first aid kit we were familiar with reduced that time by one-third. Thirty seconds might not sound like a lot, but that’s half a minute less of a wound open to the elements or someone panicking at the sight of blood. If you buy one of these preassembled bags, we urge you to thoroughly examine its existing contents and become familiar with where each item (most important, the first aid kit) is located.

If nothing else, reviewing the contents of these preassembled bags only reaffirmed our belief in the high-quality items we do recommend above.

Judy: We spent time with Judy’s Mover Max bag, which retails for $195 and is designed to sustain a family of four for three days. This bright-orange dry bag is hard to miss in a closet when you need to grab it quickly—and avoiding this pack’s social media presence is equally hard.

All of the items come organized in three cardboard boxes (each roughly the size and color scheme of a Popeyes value-meal container), divided into three categories: tools and first aid, food and water, and safety and warmth. Although the organization is convenient when it comes to finding what you need fast, the three boxes take up the entirety of the bag and make it extremely uncomfortable to carry, with the box corners digging into your back. Emptying all of the contents into the bag gives you about 50% more space, but since the bag has no internal pockets, the Mover Max becomes the emergency-prep equivalent of digging through a sack of Halloween candy no one wants.

During our wound-cleaning test, the Judy kit’s antiseptic wipes were so flimsy that they tore when we were just trying to unfold them. The hand-crank radio doesn’t pick up weather bands. It doesn’t even pick up AM radio—its plus and minus buttons cycle through FM stations, but it’s impossible to know if you’ve tuned to a specific station on the dial because there isn’t one. And it didn’t take long for the radio’s on/off sticker (a sticker!) to begin wearing off. We give Judy an A+ for its branding efforts—the design is efficiently eye-catching—but with the exception of a decently hefty multi-tool, Judy’s kit is all style over substance.

Uncharted Supply Company: This company shot to fame after being featured on Shark Tank, but its Seventy2 Pro Survival System was dead in the water to us the moment the antenna of its weather radio broke off the first time we telescoped it.

Other discouraging details: The handle of its water bottle popped off the moment we touched it, and the kit includes a knife with a baffling design choice. A glass breaker is an excellent tool to keep in a car, but incorporating one into the end of a knife handle so that the knife is poised to stab you in the kidneys should you fall the wrong way while the sheath is attached to your belt is downright dangerous. And in order to use the glass breaker, you need to turn the knife around and point the blade directly toward yourself as you gather momentum for a thrust. One could argue that the knife is meant to be sheathed before you use the glass breaker, but if it’s attached to your waist and your car is filling up with water, are you really going to take time to undo your belt and shimmy the whole thing off?

The $590 Seventy2 Pro Survival System does have some good qualities (and Uncharted also has a version for just one person, the Seventy2 Survival System, for about $300). The organization is quite convenient, with contents to sustain two people located in easy-to-find, clearly labeled individual pockets within a large, fold-out insert, but the insert is also the bag’s biggest downside—it’s a large modular encasement that takes up the entire pack. The insert is designed to be carried separately if you like, freeing up the main bag for customization, but whoever gets stuck carrying the insert is in for some pain—the straps are thin and cause stress in the shoulders and lower neck.

The modular format comes in especially handy with the first aid kit. Essentially a mini version of the overall insert, the first aid kit provides all of the essentials clearly marked in individual pockets, plus three separate empty spaces for you to add personal items. But it simply didn’t have enough bandages, gauze pads, or sterile wipes, and the contents of a supplemental first aid kit that arrived separately were severely compromised due to several packs of petroleum jelly that had burst and leaked en route.

American Red Cross: We’re loath to speak ill of the Red Cross, but the $184 Deluxe 3-Day Emergency Preparedness Kit that the organization recommends, designed for one person, disappointed from the start with a cheap flashlight that arrived broken both inside and out. That doesn’t bode well for the quality and long-term usefulness of the other included items, such as a multi-tool with easily bendable instruments.

This bag at least practices what the nonprofit preaches, leaving a good amount of room for customization in both the bag itself and the first aid kit, which is conveniently located in an outer pocket.

Echo-Sigma: This outfit prides itself on partnering with well-regarded brands, and indeed, the $290 Get Home Bag we looked at came with a Gerber Dime—we recommend the similar Gerber Gear Dime as an also-great pick in our guide to the best multi-tools. The included Fenix flashlight is top-notch, too, but this midsize pack has no room for customization aside from its MOLLE (modular lightweight load-carrying equipment) exterior straps.

The one-person Get Home Bag doesn’t include a weather radio, either. You’d need to buy one as an add-on or upgrade to Echo-Sigma’s more expensive option, the Bug Out Bag Complete Emergency Kit. Should you go that route, you’d end up with our Midland weather radio pick, but for around the same cost of that upgraded bag ($620), you can build your own bag with all of the recommendations we list in this guide and still have loads of room for customization.

Emergency Zone: When we unzipped the 2 Person Family Prep 72 Hour Survival Kit, the first item to pop out was a roll of toilet paper. Emergency Zone’s preassembled bag was the only one we looked at that included this necessary-for-all component, but the roll also symbolized our reaction to the pack overall.

An enormous flashlight takes up valuable real estate but emits a weak beam. A weather radio roughly the size of a pack of Trident gum was capable of picking up a weather-band signal in the Catskills only if we remained extremely still and pointed the antenna 32 degrees northeast. And the contents of the first aid kit spilled out everywhere the first time we unzipped it because the case consisted of only two very loose mesh pockets on either side of the interior. The same flimsy webbing, without a hint of elastic to hold items in place, is also inexplicably used on a couple of the bag’s outside pockets.

If the bag weren’t so poorly constructed, the actual design would be convenient, with plenty of exterior pockets for easy access to items. But by the time we got to the multi-tool—easily the weakest we saw, with a knife that visibly wiggled from side to side—Emergency Zone’s preassembled kit almost broke our “something is better than nothing” philosophy.

Preppi: We called in the company’s $545 Prepster Backpack, which is designed to sustain one person for three days.

Preppi’s founders come from the world of film and design, and it shows. The bag itself is beautifully made, constructed from leather and water-resistant canvas, and it comes with a lifetime guarantee. But we still don’t think it’s the right bag to rely on in an emergency. It’s packed to the brim, so there’s no room for customization, and the thin shoulder straps might be quality leather, but they’d be painful to wear for any extended period of time.

The contents include some pleasant surprises, such as a weather radio that seems far more durable than the brittle plastic ones found in other bags we looked at. The weather-band reception was strong, and the radio can charge via solar, battery, or the hand crank. And Preppi’s first aid kit is made by Adventure Medical Kits, the same company that makes our pick for the best first aid kit for hiking and the outdoors.

As for all the luxuries that initially made us roll our eyes, well, we don’t judge if a small bottle of bergamot-scented face wash makes you feel calmer while you’re riding out a hurricane at a shelter. Preppi appeals to a specific demographic, and if prepacked little indulgences and overall bag aesthetics are the only things standing in the way of someone owning a go bag or not, even if it’s one we don’t recommend, we have to stand on the side of potentially saving lives over anything else.

That said, let’s hammer this point home one last time for posterity: Having something is better than nothing, but building your own bag will always be the best option.