jacqui_wirecutter

Hi. I'm the Editor in Chief at Wirecutter & Sweethome. We do not editorially limit ourselves to Amazon; we just prefer Amazon if possible due to cheap (or "free" if you have Amazon Prime) shipping that can go almost anywhere. Since we take shipping into account for every single thing we recommend, Amazon often ends up being the top choice since it's so pervasive. That said, we often link to more than one retailer since things can sell out here or there all the time. And if we find something that is the "best" product and it doesn't happen to be on Amazon, then we link to wherever it's available. For example, our best yoga mat choice isn't on Amazon, so we link directly to the retailer on that case. Like I said, our goal is always to find what we consider to be the best, regardless of who makes it or where it comes from. Sometimes that means we won't make any money on the piece at all—it's not ideal obviously, but that's how we operate.

In a weird twist of fate, I can actually answer this question. We actually have a full guide to personal lubricants coming up, but it's not published just yet. I just spoke to the reviewer doing that guide and he believes our pick will probably be Swiss Navy.

Edit: We also have a huge, major update coming to our vibrator guide as well, written by an educator from the Kinsey Institute. It's going to be fucking amazing.

I like how you guys explain the (long) process you went through for each review. Any cool or surprising facts you learned that didn't make it into the official articles?

If we ever find something crazy or interesting, we almost always try to include it in the article, because we like being transparent and telling our readers about the weird discoveries we've made.

Some examples of that include: -Discovering that some commercial facial tissues can't absorb liquids at all -Discovering that some highly-popular turntables have major sound shift issues that go against what the manufacturer claims in the specs -Discovering that modern dishwashers functionally work better at cleaning your dishes when you don't rinse them beforehand (this is because they have dirty water sensors, and if they sense the water isn't too full of crap, the dishwasher won't run as long or hard as it would if the water was really dirty)

What do you do with all the stuff after you review it? Do you have a drawer that's full of like 15 spatulas?

It depends on how we obtained the product. If it was lent to us by the company (usually this only applies for expensive electronics, like laptops) then we always send them back. If we bought it ourselves (which we do for the majority of things), we either resell it online, give it away (we donated all our winter boots from last year's tests to a homeless shelter), or it sits in a giant stack in our Los Angeles office until we can figure out what to do with it. We do require our writers to keep and use the main pick until there's another update so we can add long-term test notes later on.

How do you keep track of all the new / discontinued products?

Lots and lots and lots of research. And insane beat writers & editors who follow that stuff like their life depended on it.

Also here are the things I need to buy/replace soon, any recommendations would be appreciated! toilet cleaners, deep freezer, duvet cover

Toilet cleaners, as in the chemical, or toilet brushes? Either way, a guide to toilet brushes is coming soon, and we hope to tackle much more home cleaning stuff in the coming year.

First up, we love and respect Consumer Reports and the work they do. Most of our reviews start from a base of research that is pulled from all sources we can get our hands on, which includes Consumer Reports. We then take that base of research and build upon it, develop tests that others haven't done yet, etc. etc. and draw conclusions based on the collective info (research + testing + anything else we have found).

One thing we feel differentiates us from Consumer Reports is that we take a very "real world" and humanistic approach to our reviews. If you read CR a lot (which we do), you'll notice that they do a lot of quantitative testing and draw conclusions based on the numbers and stats that they found from their testing. We are all familiar with the giant CR chart.

We differ from that a bit because we try to focus on a combination of best performance + overall user experience. Ease of use is a huge factor in a lot of our reviews (for both Wirecutter and Sweethome), and sometimes the absolute best performer is horrible to use. We try to take a step back and think about what we would tell our friends or family if they asked us which humidifier to buy, or which WiFi router to buy. If we find something that is 95% as good as the top performer but it's significantly easier to use and also cheaper (just an example I pulled out of my butt) then we are going to recommend that product as our top pick, whereas CR would likely recommend the absolute top performer.

Also, we design our tests very differently than CR. Sometimes they design tests that we don't agree with (but we take them into account in our research, as mentioned earlier) and we try to design them so they are as real-world as possible. Basically we try to focus as much as we can on how real people are actually going to use these things instead of testing in a constantly controlled lab setting.

Our picks sometimes align with CR's picks though.

Does that make sense?

Hi! Wirecutter's Editor-in-Chief here. We do not accept money or goods in exchange for reviews. In the event that companies send us things without our knowledge or permission (like in Chris Heinonen's example), we either send it back or, if they won't accept it back, we donate it or give it away to readers.