Incrediwear is one of the world’s leading recovery wear brands, offering an assortment of specialized equipment and accessories for pain relief and muscle and join...
Incrediwear is one of the world’s leading recovery wear brands, offering an assortment of specialized equipment and accessories for pain relief and muscle and joint recovery. Despite Incrediwear’s leading position in the recovery wear market, there have been multiple brands challenging its status as the industry leader.
Thermo Recovery Wear is quickly positioning itself as one of the most serious contenders, with a broad catalog of high-quality recovery wear. But how do its products compare to Incrediwear’s?
We’ll review all the relevant characteristics and see which brand comes out as superior.
Let’s dive into the direct comparison of Thermo Recovery Wear vs Incrediwear!
A Tale of Two Brands: A Brief Overview
Each brand has a story to it: its history, focus, and mission. We’ll touch on Incrediwear’s and Thermo Recovery Wear’s brand stories before moving on to a comprehensive comparison of the two.
Incrediwear: The Basics
Founded by Dr. Jackson Corley after surviving a near-fatal biking accident, Incrediwear was inspired by a need to find a newer, faster, and more convenient method of recovery that helps athletes and other people with an active lifestyle quickly recover from injuries and return to their usual active routine.
Incrediwear’s compression gear proved to be an excellent and highly effective way of improving blood flow, helping the body recover from muscle soreness, muscle fatigue, and various injuries more quickly. This has propelled the brand to assume a lead in the recovery wear market.
Thermo Recovery Wear: What We Are About
Led by its founder and CEO, Charles Smith, and under constant guidance from its board of expert medical advisors, Thermo Recovery Wear is on a mission to help over 100 million Americans struggling with chronic pain heal better and faster by leveraging their body’s natural healing process.
Thermo’s catalog of recovery products is manufactured with state-of-the-art materials and techniques, providing its customers with the best-quality recovery wear in the industry—all at a price affordable to anyone.
Thermo Recovery Wear vs. Incrediwear: A Point-By-Point Comparison
So which of the two brands offers a better bang for your buck? Let’s make a point-by-point comparison for all relevant aspects.
1. Fabric Quality
Both Thermo Recovery Wear and Incrediwear products are made using germanium carbon fabric, as well as bamboo charcoal (also known as black diamond fabric). These technologies originate in East Asia, where they’re still mainly popular.
Despite the claims of many recovery wear brands, these techniques aren’t originally theirs—they’ve been around in Asia ever since the ‘90s.
The central aspects of these fabrics are their powerful conductive and absorptive properties enabled by their use of carbon. After interacting with your body’s natural heat, the fabric’s semiconductor elements release negative ions which activate cellular vibrations, in turn improving your blood circulation.
Improved blood flow means more nutrients and oxygen for the affected area, translating into faster recovery.
While it may seem like the same type of fabric on the surface, there are vital differences between the way it’s used for these two brand’s products. Most importantly, we’ve found that Incrediwear hasn’t updated its fabric weave in over a decade, leading to products that don’t take advantage of the latest weave technology.
Thermo’s products, on the other hand, use an improved fabric weave, which is thinner and has a higher concentration of both carbon and germanium. This improves comfort, breathability, and moisture-wicking while accelerating your body’s natural capacities even further.
It’s also worth mentioning that Thermo is currently experimenting with the possibility of replacing germanium with graphene, which is lighter, cooler, and more eco-friendly while not sacrificing circulation-boosting qualities in the least.
The Verdict
Despite using the same types of fabric, which are germanium carbon and bamboo charcoal, Thermo’s versions use an improved weave, leading to lighter and more comfortable products with better blood flow.
Thermo also regularly experiments with the formula and improves it as necessary, while Incrediwear’s hasn’t changed in over a decade.
2. Ergonomics
Despite their claims to ergonomic design, we found that Incrediwear’s range of products leaves a lot to be desired in that regard. Many of their products don’t seem like they’ve been properly designed to fit the body part they’re supposed to be for.
Sometimes, they even feel as if they are merely resized versions of other items in Incrediwear’s catalog.
For example, Incrediwear’s knee sleeve stays are placed behind the knee, which feels obstructive while trying to bend your knee and do exercise moves as basic as simple squats.
Thermo Recovery Wear’s catalog boasts a much more ergonomic design. Let’s take the knee sleeve as an example, which, unlike Incrediwear’s, places its stays on the sides. Thanks to this placement, the obstruction is minimal, leading to superior mobility while keeping the same level of support.
The Verdict
Thermo Recovery Wear wins out here, thanks to a careful design process that pays special care to the specific ergonomic demands of each body part. The products’ design is also revised as necessary, following any recurring customer complaints and suggestions
3. Product Innovation
For its 15 years in business, Incrediwear’s product catalog hasn’t changed much since its launch. This lack of innovation is, sadly, reflective of a lack of willingness to listen to the exact needs of their customers, which is a problem we’ve observed with their line’s lackluster ergonomics.
Thermo Recovery Wear aims to constantly introduce innovations by following industry trends and listening to our customers’ needs and demands.
For example, the knee sleeve comes in several versions depending on your exact needs. Do you want a knee sleeve only for sleeping, without any plans to use it for exercise or outdoor activities? You can buy a version without stays, so they don’t present a pesky and unnecessary addition that will only ruin your sleeping comfort.
New designs and materials are constantly experimented with, as well as new, original uses: even products for dogs and horses are in the research pipeline right as we speak!
The Verdict
Incrediwear’s stagnancy and lack of willingness to listen to its customers make it lose out on this point too. Thermo is showing a much greater commitment to constant innovation, with new designs, product variants, and improved materials.
4. Product Variety
Although Incrediwear’s additions of special shorts, pants, or socks for improved blood flow are highly welcome, the line’s original goal is to help with recovery from joint injuries, ligament injuries, and other causes of swelling and inflammation.
Despite the collection’s basic purpose, there’s a striking lack of variety in essential recovery products: a neck sleeve, double shoulder sleeve, or finger sleeves are all missing.
Meanwhile, Thermo Recovery Wear offers all these products, along with ankle sleeves, back sleeves, elbow sleeves, knee sleeves, and wrist sleeves, some of them in several versions.
Unlike Incrediwear, Thermo Recovery Wear offers three separate collections based on their intended demographic. The Lite collection is designed for home use, the Classic line is designed for people with an active lifestyle, and the Pro collection is for individuals who do high-impact sports and other highly intensive activities.
Thermo’s products aren’t limited to humans only. Soon your furry friend will also be able to enjoy them, thanks to an upcoming line for pets, which should start with products specially designed for dogs.
The Verdict
When it comes to actual recovery wear, Thermo’s catalog wins out again, covering twice as many body parts as Incrediwear, with several versions for some of the products added.
But we can’t deny that Incrediwear offers special circulation wear such as pants, shorts, or socks.
5. Product Sizing
Incrediwear has a somewhat confusing sizing system, where the smallest size is labeled a medium. In practice, it’s still closer to what would usually be considered an S than to an M. This has caused a lot of returns for the company due to confused customers.
Otherwise, the sizes are the same for Thermo Recovery Wear—both brands offer five sizes for each product, where the only difference is how they’re labeled.
The Verdict
Both brands offer the same five sizes, but Incrediwear’s decision to start with M as the smallest size label has led to a lot of confusion on their customers’ part.
6. Price
Over the past several years, Incrediwear has been steadily ramping up its prices. The knee sleeve that we had already set aside as the go-to example is illustrative here too. Only a few years back, it cost $40, but now the price is up to $55. Considering Incrediwear’s weak track record of product innovation, this is unacceptable.
Despite constantly innovating our products and expanding our catalog, Thermo Recovery Wear aims to leave its prices constant, regardless of what happens with market fluctuations or potentially increased operational costs.
In that sense, we aim to be the Arizona Iced Tea of recovery wear, not letting our customers suffer any potential increases in production expenses.
To add to that, Thermo’s products are cheaper as it is, with the overall prices being 25-30% lower than Incrediwear’s.
The Verdict
Thermo Recovery Wear’s products are significantly more affordable and aim to remain that way despite the greater level of innovation invested in production.
7. Customer Service and Experience
For the best products in any industry, it’s necessary to have constant and consistent feedback from customers on their product experience.
This ensures that the brand can stay updated with any suggestions or complaints that customers may offer, striving to adopt any constructive critique and ultimately deliver the best possible product.
For the best possible customer service, it’s also better to keep all phases of the customer experience under direct control rather than outsourcing it to third parties.
In general, this also cuts operational costs, making the final product cheaper.
For these reasons, Thermo Recovery Wear chooses not to sell on any third-party marketplaces, but only directly. All the products are shipped straight from the factory, with no worries about any potentially dubious middlemen.
By staying in direct contact with you throughout your entire experience, we can keep in touch about any potential issues and learn how to keep making our service even better.
On the other hand, Incrediwear chooses to sell through third-party online marketplaces such as Amazon and various physical marketplaces. This leads to a disconnection between the customer and the brand, making the overall user experience much rougher and more complicated.
The Verdict
Thermo wins here once more due to avoiding the use of third-party marketplaces or any other middlemen. By keeping everything in one place, buyers are guaranteed a much simpler and more comfortable user experience, as well as easier feedback.
Final Verdict
It’s not uncommon to see brands that have been industry leaders for years fall into inertia over a lack of strong competition. Despite being pioneers in a new and promising field, we feel like this may have also happened with Incrediwear.
Although Incrediwear’s products are still remarkably high-quality, they have made the mistake of not listening to their customers while smugly sitting on the throne, letting the brand stagnate over the years. Fifteen years later, Incrediwear brings nothing especially new to the table, except for much higher product prices.
This situation has led to multiple contenders coming up with their lines of recovery wear—Thermo being one of them. As we can see from this comparison, Thermo Recovery Wear manages to bring almost everything that Incrediwear does, but in an improved and more affordable package.
This was easily done by committing to the main thing that Incrediwear managed to fail at: innovation and listening to customers.
This way, Thermo Recovery Wear has managed to develop a constantly updated line of products providing the best possible recovery wear for people around the United States without ever sacrificing affordability.
So, if you’re looking for a recovery wear brand and wondering if you should go for the tried-and-true and buy Incrediwear or look into one of the several currently available alternatives, definitely give Thermo Recovery Wear a chance.
Your struggles with joint pain will very soon become history.
