Adventure Medical Kits
Littleton, New Hampshire, 1989 — first-aid kits laid out by injury rather than by item, built in the same house as SOL, Counter Assault and the consumer QuikClot line.
Ready America
Vista, California, from a 1991 garage start — and the rare preparedness company whose spine is hardware you install rather than a bag you store.
Ready America began in a garage in 1991 and now runs a 40,000-plus square foot warehouse and office in Vista, California, with sewing and metal fabrication in Glendora and operations in Hayward and Seattle. It sells emergency kits like everyone else in this corner of the market, but the line that distinguishes it is QuakeHOLD! — earthquake putty, straps, fasteners and furniture anchor kits, hardware that gets installed and then holds something heavy in place. That is a different kind of product from a bag of supplies, and it is where this page spends its attention.
- 1991Garage start, in the founders' own telling
- 40,000+ sq ftThe Vista, California warehouse and office building
- 24 hoursStated shipping window for most orders received
What we'd reach for
- QuakeHOLD! earthquake puttyThe item that built the company — reusable putty for securing objects to a shelf. Their site cites a Los Angeles Times "top 100 products of the millennium" mention, which is a press citation rather than a test result.
- Furniture anchor kits and seismic strapsThe load-bearing half of the catalog: straps and fasteners for bookcases, water heaters, televisions and cabinets. No tested hold rating in pounds appeared on the pages we read, which is the figure a buyer actually needs.
- Aqua Blox emergency waterA house brand rather than a bought-in component, sold under a "Certificate of Approval" heading with no certificate number published beside it.
Ready America’s about page starts where a lot of California companies start: “started this business in our garage in 1991.” What it became is a 40,000-plus square foot warehouse and office in Vista, California, with custom sewing and metal fabrication in Glendora, plus operations in Hayward and Seattle. Dean Reese is named as co-founder and CEO, Jeff Primes as president since 2004, Trevyn Reese as vice president. Most orders, the page says, ship “within 24 hours of being received.”
The fastening line is the spine
Most companies in this category assemble bags. Ready America does that too, but the line that makes it interesting is QuakeHOLD! — described on its own site as “the brand name of Ready America’s earthquake products,” covering putty, seismic straps, fasteners and furniture anchor kits.
That is a materially different product from a 72-hour kit. A kit sits in a closet and is judged on what is inside it. A furniture anchor is installed into a wall stud and asked to hold a loaded bookcase through a lateral event. It is hardware with a job, and the job has a number attached to it: how much mass, at what fixing, into what substrate.
We could not find that number published. No tested hold rating in pounds, no stated furniture weight limit, no reference to a test method appeared on the QuakeHOLD! pages we read. Instead there is a marketing citation — “Consumer Reports rates QuakeHOLD! BEST in Furniture Anchor Kits” — with no date, issue or test detail, and a corporate superlative: “Ready America, Inc.™ is the oldest and largest manufacturer of earthquake safety fasteners in the United States and Japan.” Neither of those is a specification. For a product whose entire purpose is to resist a load, the load figure is the specification, and it is the one thing missing.
The kits, and the caveat that comes with every kit
The rest of the catalog is emergency kits, water, food, first aid, lighting and PPE. The same rule applies here as to every assembler:
A kit is an assembly of other companies’ products, and the assembler’s address is not the products’ address. Vista, California is where the business is; it is not where the gauze, the light, the pouches or the tools were made. Shelf life, filtration performance, battery certification and first-aid content standards all belong to component manufacturers, and a kit carries no certification of its own because there is no kit standard to carry.
This matters more here than it might elsewhere, because QuakeHOLD!’s site carries a “Made in the U.S.A.” mark without saying which products it covers — on a site that also sells food, water, first aid, lighting and PPE. An origin mark that isn’t scoped to a SKU cannot be read across a catalog, and we won’t read it that way. Ready America’s own fabrication in Glendora is genuine and specific; the marking is not.
Where they fall down
The customer list is a claim on their own page. The about page says: “We work in tandem with federal agency FEMA, as well as states, counties, and cities nationwide, plus businesses including Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Sales Force.” We verified none of it, and a customer list on a company’s own website is marketing until a contract, award notice or purchase order says otherwise.
The Mayday question is open. Ready America lists Mayday Industries under “Our Brands,” alongside QuakeHOLD!, Thumb Lock Fasteners, Aqua Blox, Big Shaker Enterprises and QuakeHOLD! Industrial. Mayday’s own site names no parent company at all. One direction of acknowledgement, no filing either of them publishes, and two separate pages on this site — see Mayday Industries — that both have to say so.
Certificates without numbers. The water and food lines are sold under a “Certificate of Approval” heading with no certificate identifier published, so the claim can’t be traced to whoever issued it.
On the documented record: the most substantial of the kit companies in this batch, on the strength of hardware it actually fabricates — held back by an origin mark nobody scoped, a load rating nobody published, and a corporate relationship nobody explained. It sits alongside Emergency Zone in category and well ahead of it in manufacturing.
More in Camp & carry
All brands →The nearest neighbors on the shelf — same categories first, same department after that.
Chinook Medical Gear
Founded in Durango, Colorado in 1990, now in Tulsa — a licensed drug wholesaler that builds custom medical kits, majority-owned since 2015 by the employee who bought it.
Emergency Zone
A 2007 Idaho family business that became a Utah kit house — and, by its own description, primarily a drop-shipper for other people's storefronts, which is the most useful thing it publishes about itself.
Mayday Industries
Huntington Beach kit house with 1,400-plus preparedness items on the shelf, a start date its own pages disagree about, and a customer list we could not verify a single line of.