Are All Apple Watch Bands Created Equal?

There are more than a million things you can buy on the internet but sometimes shopping online can be tough. For one, you don’t get to actually see or feel the products you are looking to purchase. When it comes to buying from the big brands or a 3^rd party site, it seems like they all have the same products but cheaper! We can easily go onto eBay or Amazon nowadays and find exactly what we are looking for, with many selling at 50% or less than what the big brands will charge. Tempting, isn’t it?! But can we really trust everything we see on these websites and expect the same kind of quality?

Let’s use an Apple Watch silicone band for example. You can easily go to Apple’s website and buy a Nike Sport Band for $49 plus tax. With this high price and being from a brand that we all know, we can expect this product to be of the highest quality. Unfortunately for a lot of people, spending over $50 on a piece of silicone is absurd and unaffordable. You then hop on Amazon and find almost the same exact band for $10! This sounds like a great deal so you purchase your new Apple Watch band and instantly when you open your package, you will notice the quality of your $10 band is not what you might have expected. As you can see in the image to the right, this Apple Watch band was painted to give it that two-color design, and the paint started to rub off with normal day-to-day-use.

We've found that many of these cheap silicone Apple Watch bands are dipped in latex-like paint to get the different colors. The paint layer rubs or peels off as the band is stretched over time, to reveal the true color under the paint. Our bands, like the original Apple ones, are injection-molded with the desired color so it's that color to the core. It won't peel off to reveal a different color and isn’t "sticky" (which is a common complaint of cheap Apple Watch bands because the latex paint sticks with sweat or heat from your wrist).

Epic Watch Bands has taken the time to review 100’s of Apple Watch bands from many manufacturers to find the quality that we would want to pair with our own watches! From our experience, there is significant differences in overall quality including fundamental design flaws, quality of materials used, and the craftsmanship put into both the manufacture and assembly of parts. That's why Epic Watch Bands has rejected many more bands than we've recommended.

To compare the quality of that Amazon band to our band, we will use our Active Pro Silicone Watch Bands (which we sell for $20, just $10 more than the Amazon band, yet still less than half the price of the official Apple Watch band). We cut it in half so that you can clearly see it is made from two different pieces of silicone molded together to give it the two-toned effect we were looking for. The two-colored pieces are "solid core", meaning that it will retain its color even if the outer layers suffer from wear over time. For our bands, you won’t have to worry about the paint rubbing off because there is no paint! Just high-quality Apple Watch bands at affordable prices. 

Saving money is great, but you don't have to sacrifice quality for it. So, next time you shop online, remember to look beyond the picture and price.