Welcome! I'm Dr. Juliet Spurrier, a board-certified pediatrician and the founder of GearLab's Baby site. I started the site to deliver the world's most in-depth and scientific reviews of baby products ever created. As a new parent, you deserve a trustworthy, independent, and unbiased assessment of baby products based on real-world experience and careful side-by-side testing.
As Mom-in-Chief here, I personally oversee our baby product reviews to ensure we deliver on our mission to create the best reviews in the world.
My inspiration for starting GearLab Baby was my own personal experience. Here's my story…
I was you.
Seven months pregnant, hormonal, and uncomfortable, the biggest event of my life was looming over me like an avalanche approaching. At that moment a tiny foot poking into my rib reminded me that I couldn't put off getting all of that stuff any longer.
So there I stood, at my favorite baby retailer, staring down an incredibly long line of car seats. Next to it was a wall of strollers, taking up two aisles. And past them was all the rest, aisle after aisle of baby stuff, a torture chamber of choice, and me feeling a bead of sweat form on my upper lip.
Overwhelmed was not an expected feeling for me. As a professional pediatrician, I had spent years studying babies, caring for babies, and loving babies through sickness and health. I was accustomed to being the one with the answers on all matters pertaining to infant health and newborn parenting. I could swaddle a baby with my eyes closed and had changed more diapers than the old lady who lived in a shoe.
Yet, there I was. Stunned, and too concerned about making the right choices for my baby to act. My heart raced. Baby threw an elbow.
I walked out of that baby store. I just couldn't decide, not like that, not with so many choices and brands I hadn't even heard of.
I did what a lot of first-time parents do. I turned to friends and family for help, I bought books, and I went online.
What I learned was that people tend to recommend what they used, but few people have direct hands-on experience with more than one or two competing products.
My older sister has four kids and really did her homework. She's one of those supermoms that makes it all look easy. I trust her. But half of the products she liked aren't even available now, and there are new brands today that she hadn't heard of. The onslaught of new baby products is relentless, and advice that is just one or two years old is often outdated.
As a pediatrician, I wanted to find a more scientific approach to reviews that would help me see how products compared to one another, in real-world use as well as in eco-health criteria, and with an organized side-by-side testing process. I never found it.
So, after my second baby, I decided to create GearLab Baby.
Why You Can Trust Us
We have committed ourselves to being the world's best source of baby product reviews and comparison information. Here's how it works:
- We carefully select the top baby products in each category.
- We buy the products we review, at retail just like you do, to help assure complete objectivity and independence in our ratings.
- Our Review Editors put baby products through detailed side-by-side tests that I help define, both testing in the lab and real-world use, to carefully assess performance, ease of use, and reliability.
- We rank the products, rate the products, explain why we rated them as we did, and give awards to ones we think are the best.
How We Make Money
GearLab is a free service that is entirely reader-supported. We select and review products objectively and independently. We only make money when you click on our affiliate links and buy products we've reviewed, which helps support our testing work.
Your support helps us test more products and stay ad-free.
If you click on a retailer's link on our site and make any purchase, the retailer will contribute a portion of the sale to help support this site. It won't cost you anything extra, and it's a simple way to help us fund our gear reviews. Thanks for your support of our work!
Reviews by Experts You Can Trust
Our team is filled with people with deep experience with babies, starting with myself and my 15+ years of experience as a Pediatrician and then raising two babies of my own. Our Review Team has more than 100 years of combined practical parenting and caregiving experience, and the added benefit of years of testing thousands of baby products side-by-side, in a careful and scientific manner, to figure out which ones are right for you, your baby, and your budget.
World's Most Scientific Ratings of Baby Products
If we've done our job right, you'll find the information on GearLab Baby provides the world's most scientific ratings of baby products and that our reviews and expert information make it easier for you to do the best job possible as a new parent — making more informed decisions, and choosing just the right products for you, your budget, and your baby.
Let me know how we are doing. I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks and Welcome!
Juliet Spurrier, MDFounder & Mom-in-Chief
GearLab Baby
P.S. If you like what we're doing here, you also might enjoy our GearLab sister sites, OutdoorGearLab, which provides reviews of outdoor activity gear, and TechGearLab which reviews consumer electronics products. They use a similar side-by-side comparison review process and review rating system as you find here.