How to Tell an Authentic From a Fake Shoyoroll

The absolute best way to make sure that you get an authentic Shoyoroll is to purchase your gis (and other gear) from Shoyoroll directly. But of course that means you can't buy any of the older classics that many people desire.

The next best thing you can do is purchase from someone in the secondary market who is well established and known to ONLY deal in AUTHENTIC Shoyoroll, CTRL and other BJJ gis and gear. Unfortunately there are very few of these people around. Most online sellers are NOT legitimate and, despite what they say, sell fakes to an unsuspecting Shoyoroll fan base.

One that you can trust implicitly is ShoyoGiSeller. That website will be LIVE in early 2019. Until then, feel free to email me directly by clicking this link.

Short of that you can try and protect yourself by getting photographs. LOTS of photographs. Then email them to me or even post some of them in one trustworthy Facebook forum (Shoyoroll Drama Free) and ask for help in telling if it is real or fake.

It is not only important to get photos of the full jacket and pants, but where the forgers often mess up are on the details. The patches, seam tape, bags and most notably the size tag are three areas to focus on. So those items must be clearly visible in the pictures.

Some batches of Shoyoroll kimonos are more often faked than others. Batch 17 Competitor seems to be one that is popular with the fakers as are the Batch 38 and 60 RVCA gis, and Leo Vieria "Human Chess." Most recently we've seen (and even purchased) an Illest that was faked. I bought one just to see the quality (or lack thereof) and learn more about the fakes.

Below I'll show some photographs of the fake and an authentic Illest, one of the most sought after Shoyoroll kimonos. With only 100 Navy and 50 White kimonos sold, they are rare to come across and very expensive. That being the case, it is interesting that more fake Illest's have not hit the market.

There is also a good video on YouTube where an authentic Batch 17 Competitor is compared to a fake one. It's worth a watch.

Here is a picture of a fake White Illest sent to me by a forger:

Of course you can always send me some photographs here on Facebook via PM and I'll take a look at them and give you my thoughts.

Click here to to go my profile where you can PM me anytime.

And again, email me anytime by clicking here.