One Writer, Published Documents, No Test Lab

What this site is for

Forge & Forever exists for one kind of buyer: the person who hates rebuying. Someone who would rather pay more once and be done, who reads the warranty before the reviews, and who has learned to be suspicious of the word “premium”.

It covers six categories - boots and leather, cast iron and kitchen, socks and workwear, camp gear, pet gear, watches and tools - and judges everything in them on the same three things: what the published warranty actually covers, whether the thing can be repaired and by whom, and what it is made of. There are currently 92 guides and comparisons here covering 171 products.

Who writes it

Mike M., the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media. Everything on this site is written by him. There is no content team, no rotating freelancer pool and no “our panel of experts”.

Mike M. is the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media and writes everything on Forge & Forever. He is not a cobbler, a bladesmith or a materials engineer, and this site runs no test lab. What it does instead is read the warranty document rather than the marketing page, check whether a product has published repair parts and a service path, and say plainly when a thing is not worth owning at any price.

That is a deliberately modest biography, and it is the accurate one. A great many gear sites claim credentials and hands-on testing that would be physically impossible at the volume they publish. We would rather tell you exactly what we do and let the method carry the weight - the full version is on the how we judge durability page.

The claims we do not make

• We have not tested these products. No lab, no wear tests, no sample units.
• We publish no star ratings or scores. A number implies a measurement we did not make, and there is no review or rating markup anywhere on this site.
• There are no testimonials here. We have none that are real, so there is no section for them.
• No brand has paid for placement. Not for a position in a list, not for a mention.
• We invent no credentials. Nobody here is a cobbler, a bladesmith or a materials engineer.

How it is funded

Through the Amazon Associates program. When you buy something through a link here, we earn an advertising fee at no extra cost to you. That is the whole business model, and the full disclosure sets out exactly how it works.

The test of whether a commission changes the editorial is not what a site promises - it is what it is willing to publish against its own interest. On this site: we decline to recommend retractable dog leashes at any price, we tell you that most Blundstones cannot be resoled, we put a $20 skillet above a $300 one, and the cheaper boot wins several of the head-to-head comparisons outright.

Who publishes it

Forge & Forever is published by Iron Mako Media, an independent publisher of buying guides. The site is owned and operated by Iron Mako Media - it is not part of a larger media group and it does not share content or staff with any other title.

Corrections

Warranty terms change, products get discontinued, and construction methods get altered quietly between production runs. If you find something on this site that is wrong, tell us and we will change the page and update its modified date rather than leaving the old claim up.

The editorial policy sets out how corrections are handled. The quickest route is the contact form, or email contact@forgeandforever.com.