SATISFIED PHLSTER FAMILY MEMBER: ME
- Jun 26th 2025
- By
This is the part of the shiny new newsletter format where we’re going to introduce your fellow CCW peeps who have become members of the PHLster family by discovering one of our solutions that answered a problem they’d been wrestling with in the unforgiving everyday carry arena.
Since I’m the new editor of the newsletter, I’m going to cheat by making myself the subject of this first column.
My name is Tamara Keel, and you may know me from my participation on gun forums back in the day, my current gig of penning articles and columns for magazines both online and in dead tree format, or my personal blog. (Do people still read those?)
I first encountered PHLster back in the early days, when Jon was still bending Kydex experimentally in the ‘hood. I was toying with appendix inside-the-waistband carry at the time, as so many advances in the field had yet to occur, and both the original Skeleton and Classic holsters performed yeoman duty for me in that time.
Not long after that, I was doing a fair number of carbine classes for work and wearing a “war belt”. Especially in a cool go-fast carbine setting, the PHLster Flatpack tourniquet carrier was a godsend. Before I adopted that, I’d gone through experiences as embarrassing as a SOFTT-W coming completely unspooled off my plate carrier in the middle of a force-on-force exercise in the middle of a shoot house.
“Hang on, I gotta stuff my TQ into a pocket or something so I don’t trip on it” is not a thing you want to have to tell a partner in the middle of a gunfight.
Of course, there was the Enigma, which was a transformative moment in CCW, but the next big one for me was the City Special variant for the Taurus TORO. Compact revolvers with optical sights were a difficult holster-making challenge, and PHLster was the first company to crack the code, and that’s a large part of why I’m here today.
Anyway, my name is Tamara Keel, and I’m pleased to meet you (virtually), and I look forward to introducing you to more members of our PHLster family!