Plus, the exterior is fully rain- and windproof, so it should definitely keep you nice and dry. Totes also has the signature clear umbrella stylish see through umbrella to help you navigate busy streets. Hunter is a British brand that has been around for more than a century, designing innovative products that safeguard users from the weather and other environmental stresses. If you want to brave the rainy day in style, you may want to check out the original bubble umbrella from Hunter.
Hunter also makes umbrellas for kids with a similar design. You might be familiar with Samsonite for its decades-long expertise in crafting luggage and travel bags.
It also has a curved handle for comfort and an auto-open and close button that can be easily used with just one hand. There are a lot of umbrellas out there, and we're always testing more. Here are a few others that we like that didn't quite make our list of top picks. Eight Strong Ribs: Make sure there are at least eight ribs and that the ribs are made of some type of fiberglass—it's a flexible and sturdy material, so it'll fare better resisting high winds.
It's even better if the shaft is made of fiberglass, too. For the longest time, my problem with umbrellas wasn't just the shoddy quality with the cheap ones I bought. It was how I frequently left them behind after a night out. There's no secret trick to remembering your umbrella before you leave a venue, but there are some ways that can help.
Attach a Bluetooth tracker on the umbrella. This one from Tile can stick anywhere and you can see the last location of where you placed your umbrella, which might help when you're trying to relocate it. Buy from a company that offers loss prevention. Davek is one of the few brands that do this. If you lose the umbrella, you get 50 percent off a replacement.
This is purely anecdotal, but whenever I've used a more expensive umbrella, I've always been more conscious about grabbing it before leaving a party or restaurant than the cheaper ones. I can't say that this will actually work for anyone else, though. Louryn Strampe also researched and reviewed umbrellas to contribute to this guide. Photograph: Blunt. Photograph: Balios. Photograph: Davek. Photograph: Weatherman. Photograph: NTOI.
It's sturdy and provides good coverage when open, collapsing down to just a foot in length. It comes in tons of gorgeous colors, and a single button opens and collapses the fiberglass ribs. The reason why it's not in our top picks? Close," according to my fellow umbrella reviewer, Louryn Strampe.
Fully closing this umbrella is a two-hand operation, and she got so fed up with it during testing that she often just used the ground as leverage to push the handle all the way down.
She tested a few umbrellas from Repel, and unfortunately, it's a problem across the lineup. This one does a fair job dealing with high winds, and it has a great price, but be prepared to wrestle with it when it comes time to close it. The inch canopy is more than large enough to keep you and someone else dry, and its fiberglass shaft and wind-resistant frame withstand gusts big and small.
The handle has a rubbery grip and a single red button to open and expand the canopy. A Teflon coating ensures it dries quickly after the storm has passed.
The handle is awkward to grip, and combined with the 3-foot length, Louryn felt the umbrella was too top-heavy for her 5'1" frame. It's a great large, affordable option if you can handle its 1. Just don't expect it to last too long. The extra hardware here means extra performance and durability: The construction of these ribs lets them flex enough to resist damage in wind yet maintain the canopy shape in heavy rains or gusts.
The canopy itself is coated in Teflon, so raindrops, sleet, and snowflakes slide right off, adding no extra weight to your umbrella and never saturating the fabric. The umbrella also has an auto-open and close button to make it easy when you're headed out the door or back in.
Packed down, the Repel Windproof Travel Umbrella measures less than a foot in length and weighs less than 1 pound. That compact storage size does indeed make it good for travel but its general quality makes it an overall good umbrella for everyday use. Lastly, the Repel Umbrella is guaranteed to last a lifetime, outside of damage other than from normal wear and tear.
If you've ever had an umbrella rib snap on you beyond repair, you know this is a big deal. The Travel Umbrella from Weatherman is a compact, lightweight umbrella that's built durably with reinforced fiberglass and features a design capable of withstanding winds up to 45 mph. Pros: Durable components won't buckle under high winds, canopy has reflective features for increased visibility, repels water well, dries quickly, and quickly and easily opens and closes.
A quality umbrella should be easy to transport, remain durable in most weather conditions, and protect you from the elements — but it's hard to find all three of those features done well in an umbrella meant for traveling.
Then I tried Weatherman's Travel Umbrella , a sturdy, storm-ready umbrella that impressively checks all three of those boxes. For starters, the Travel Umbrella is built using reinforced fiberglass plastic that helps it avoid flipping inside-out when a gust of wind hits it. Although I haven't taken it into weather with heavy gusts, it has performed well during a few fall NYC storms and the Weatherman site says its rated up to withstand wind up to 45 miles per hour I look forward to putting this to the test even more over the coming months, too.
The umbrella is also incredibly lightweight and easy to carry. Weighing just shy of one pound and less than a foot in length when collapsed, it easily fits into a backpack or a medium-sized briefcase. There's also a built-in wrist strap for anyone who goes bag-less or just wants to carry it. One of the clear drawbacks for any travel umbrella is its ability or lack thereof to keep you dry from any droplets falling off its canopy. Although the Travel Umbrella certainly wouldn't stand in for something like a golf umbrella, I did find it to do fairly well at avoiding too much run-off from hitting my shoes or the bottoms of my pants.
I did still get a little wet but compared to other travel umbrellas I've tested, this managed to perform far better. I also like that it's available in a variety of bright colors like salmon, pink, teal, or neon green among others , and that it comes with a small tote bag that it can slide into when it's not being used.
Still, it's quality and performance is undeniable, making it a purchase that I highly recommend. The G4Free Automatic Double Canopy Golf Umbrella is rugged and big enough to keep you plus a friend dry and comes with a lifetime warranty.
Golf umbrellas may be a bit of a misnomer considering most people use them off the green. But when it comes to ensuring you'll stay completely dry — or you plus a friend — golf umbrellas are a go-to. The G4Free Automatic Double Canopy Golf Umbrella has a inch wide canopy supported by hardened steel ribs, and it comes with a lifetime warranty, which is a good first sign that it's something to trust. Furthermore, it won't bend or break in strong winds and is particularly wind-resistant thanks to a double canopy design that lets wind through it while preventing it and water from coming down onto you.
There is a downside, however: The fact it's a big umbrella means it come standard with nearly 5 pounds of weight. This isn't exactly a city option but if you're looking for a big umbrella to stash in the trunk of your car or to use on walks around town or at picnics, it's worth the added weight. If you've had one too many umbrellas snap on you, find peace of mind that the Blunt Metro Travel Umbrella can withstand heavy rains and wind gusting at up to 55 miles per hour. Pros: Great wind resistance, durable construction, available in multiple colors.
While all the umbrellas on our list are structurally sound to hold up against serious wind, some people have had one too many umbrellas break on them to trust just any ole product.
The Blunt Metro Travel Umbrella is tough enough to resist flipping out of shape even in 55 mph wind thanks to a unique radial tensioning system. The canopy is held in place by ribs much like any other umbrella, but it is reinforced with additional hardware to ensure it'll stay open and in dome shape even in the worst weather.
But you can't put a price on reliability and longevity, either. We tested it and found it to be worth the investment as both a durable and reliable umbrella option. The Balios Prestige Travel Umbrella looks and feels premium—with a wooden handle and solid build quality—and it costs about the same as the Repel.
It held up well to strong winds, and its inch-wide canopy bounced back easily after it was forced to invert during testing. It deploys quickly, and the handle feels solid to hold. The Lewis N.
Clark Umbrella was a previous top pick and is still a great value—this lightweight travel model frequently goes on sale for about half as much as our other picks, which makes it a good bet for kids or other people who frequently lose umbrellas.
We also like that it comes in five colors. In this model, you get classic style and impressive durability at a very reasonable weight—and price. If you want more coverage than a compact automatic umbrella can provide, a stick umbrella often misidentified as a golf umbrella , while heavy, can protect more than just your upper torso.
It also looks better than you might expect for the price. But if you want something with a nicer finish and made from more premium materials, we did test some pricier stick umbrellas with nicer finishes that performed just as well, but they cost more than five times as much as the Totes.
Levee operates out of an office building in Midtown Manhattan that is stocked with high-end models from around the world. Together with Levee, we examined a range of brands, discussing performance, value, and owner satisfaction. As always, we started with our own past research and testing, and we looked at other online reviews. Before our last visit to Rain or Shine, we consulted the work of the good folks at OutdoorGearLab , who have done their own extensive umbrella trials.
Good Housekeeping has performed useful tests, too. The folks at The Art of Manliness provide history and generally informed opinion. Our interview with umbrella guru Center revealed a sad truth: Most—though not all—umbrella making is outsourced to generalist manufacturers, often to the detriment of quality.
Supporting that fact was our dive into online reviews and retail offerings, which revealed an alarming number of cheap, physically identical umbrellas available under multiple, rarely well-known brands. Armed with this background information, we were able to develop some key criteria to help us narrow down the field of qualified contestants.
For our update, we conducted research on dozens of new automatic, manual, ultralight, reversible, and stick umbrellas. In , we built on what we learned from the previous updates, testing an additional seven umbrellas from Herschel, Balios, Davek, and Totes. We also checked out the most recent examples of inverted umbrellas and included more detailed notes on what we think of that design.
To state the obvious, an umbrella is supposed to keep you dry. But once canopies get wider than the to inch range—the typical size of the automatic umbrellas we tested—you start running into weight issues without gaining significantly better coverage. With that established, in subsequent years we focused our testing on other aspects of umbrella performance and build quality. We concentrated instead on testing the umbrellas in real-world scenarios and, perhaps most important, seeing how they held up to stiff winds.
Umbrellas have to be lightweight yet resilient, and even with modern ripstop fabrics and alloys and composites, that necessitates a compromise: flexibility. A good umbrella will withstand a stiff breeze, but also invert—flip inside out—when a sudden gust overwhelms its strength limits.
In effect, it will bend rather than break. What matters is its ability to flip back to proper form easily and repeatedly.
In , writer and tester Sarah J. A few days later, during a sunny but blustery day, she did a second lap, this time pushing the baby in a stroller. She brought her observations to Wirecutter editor Tim Heffernan, who had performed the tests; together we made a subjective judgment based on factors such as weight, balance, and handle comfort.
For the cane umbrellas, which were considerably taller and heavier, we considered the ease of use for Sarah, who is 5 feet 2 inches, and for Tim and writer Daniel Varghese, who are both about 6 feet tall. Then the most promising candidates weathered a series of stress tests. After weeding out models that were too hard to flip back or were damaged in the process, we tested the survivors during various New York City squalls.
Updates writer James Austin used these umbrellas during his daily commute, taking into account the amount of protection provided and how easy they were to carry on the buses, trains, and streets of New York. The Repel Easy Touch Umbrella is our overall pick because in quality and durability it equals models we saw for more than twice the price. You can find lighter options out there—the Repel weighs just over 14 ounces—but along with its heft comes the ability to withstand big gusts.
Still, when fully extended, its inch canopy offers plenty of coverage. One of the selling points of the Repel is its nine-rib construction, whereas most standard umbrellas typically have eight or fewer ribs.
The extra rib provides a greater amount of reinforcement across the canopy, and therefore greater durability. When the Repel did invert, its fiberglass ribs arched easily in the direction they were pushed. And when we pressed the automatic close button, they snapped back into place. Its automatic open and close mechanism is quite satisfying. Pressing the button snaps it forcefully to attention with almost no perceptible play in the fully deployed shaft.
Its polyester, Teflon-coated canopy showed no sign of dents or fraying stitching—even after the stress tests. One caveat: We recommend sidestepping the double-canopy color options such as the blue-sky design, which adds an extra layer of fabric that makes the umbrella heavier and harder to tie together.
After more than six months of regular use, the Repel has continued to impress us with its resilience. Even in the face of significant winds, it never flips inside out. The Easy Touch umbrella experienced a pervasive counterfeit issue in April and May of , but a representative from Upper Echelon Products Repel's parent company assured us that this problem has been resolved.
We plan to monitor the Amazon listing of the umbrella more closely, just to be sure. In the meantime, be mindful of third-party sellers of the Easy Touch on Amazon.
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