Orion
Easton, Maryland — flares, smoke and signal kits made in Indiana and Pennsylvania, for the one federal requirement most boaters discover has quietly expired.
SOL
Survive Outdoors Longer — the bivvy-and-signal end of Adventure Ready Brands, Littleton NH, and a brand that publishes almost nothing about its own origins.
SOL — Survive Outdoors Longer — is the survival-gear brand inside Adventure Ready Brands, the Littleton, New Hampshire house that also runs Adventure Medical Kits, Counter Assault and the consumer QuikClot line. It covers emergency bivvies, blankets, fire starters, whistles, signal mirrors and small survival kits at prices low enough that most people buy one and never think about it again. What the brand does not publish is a founding year, a manufacturing arrangement, or a test figure behind most of its headline numbers — and this page says so rather than filling the gaps.
- Littleton, NH944 Industrial Park Rd — the address SOL shares with the rest of the ARB house
- Since 1975Parent Adventure Ready Brands' own founding claim; SOL publishes no date of its own
- 55+Countries ARB says its brands sell into
What we'd reach for
- Emergency bivvies and blanketsThe line the brand is known for. Heat-reflection percentages are marketed per SKU; none is reproduced here because no test method behind them is published.
- Fire starters and tinderSparkers and treated cord, including a 550 paracord with a tinder core — the class of product where the spec that matters is what burns when wet.
- Whistles and signal mirrorsThe cheapest useful things in the catalog. Decibel and range figures are marketing figures unless a standard is named alongside them.
SOL is the cheap end of staying alive, and it is one of the few brands where that sentence is a compliment. A foil bivvy costs less than a restaurant meal, weighs almost nothing, and spends years unopened in a pack lid. The whole category exists because the failure it addresses is unplanned — a twisted ankle at four in the afternoon, a river crossing that goes wrong, a night that arrives faster than the descent.
What the brand is short on is paperwork about itself.
Which company this actually is
SOL stands for Survive Outdoors Longer, and it is a brand of Adventure Ready Brands, the Littleton, New Hampshire house whose About page gives 944 Industrial Park Rd and says “The company was founded in 1975.” The ARB homepage places SOL in its Adventure Ready Gear group alongside Counter Assault and LuminAID, with Adventure Medical Kits and QuikClot in a separate health and wellness group, and says the brands are “sold in over 55 countries around the world.”
SOL’s own site carries the same Littleton address in its footer and organizes itself into bivvies, emergency blankets, fire starters and tinder, survival kits, and a gear shelf of compasses, whistles and lights. It does not publish a founding year, a founder, or a company history. That is unusual for a survival brand, most of which lead with origin stories, and it is worth stating plainly: we could not confirm when SOL began, so this page carries no date.
The house structure shows through the storefront, too. Requesting the full product listing on the SOL domain returns After Bite, Adventure Medical and Counter Assault items mixed in with SOL’s own — one commerce system serving several brand front doors. Nothing improper about that; it just means the domain you are on tells you less than you would think about who made what.
What is engineered here and what is sourced
This is the honest ambiguity of the brand. SOL sells shelters, sparkers, blankets, cordage, whistles and mirrors — categories that are widely manufactured to commodity specifications and branded afterwards. Some of it may be designed in Littleton. Some of it is near-certainly bought in. No SOL product page found in this pass states who manufactures it or where, and the parent’s New Hampshire address is a corporate address, not a factory claim.
Where they fall down
No founding date, no history, no manufacturing disclosure. For a brand whose products are bought on trust and opened once, in the worst hour of a trip, that is a thin public record.
Headline percentages without a method. Emergency blankets and bivvies are sold on reflected-body-heat figures across the whole category. Without a named test standard, those numbers cannot be compared between brands — so none is printed here.
Whistle and mirror figures are marketing figures. Range and decibel claims in this category rarely name a measurement standard. Treat them as ranking information, not physics.
Single-use gear that looks reusable. Foil bivvies tear. The cheapness is the point, and the replacement schedule is the buyer’s to keep.
Where SOL fits
The pack item you hope stays sealed. Bivvy, whistle, mirror, sparker — under half a pound, and the reason people carry it is the same reason they carry a spare headtorch.
Layered with real signaling. A mirror is a daylight tool. When the plan has to work at night or beyond line of sight, that is Orion, Cyalume and ACR Electronics territory, and SOL should sit under those rather than instead of them.
Not for: anyone who wants engineering documentation, a serviceable shelter, or a repeatable specification.
Why we rate them
The category deserves to be cheap, and SOL keeps it cheap. Price is what gets this gear into packs that would otherwise carry nothing.
The house is at least legible. ARB names its brands and its address, which is more than several competitors manage.
The gaps are the story. A brand that publishes no founding date and no manufacturing detail gets rated on what it sells, not on what it says — and what it sells is still worth carrying.
More in Field & pursuits
All brands →The nearest neighbors on the shelf — same categories first, same department after that.
ACR Electronics
Fort Lauderdale, since 1956 — the rescue beacon that talks to a government satellite system and never asks for a subscription.
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.
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.