Every once in awhile you run into a product revelation. Something that you didn’t know you were missing until you wondered how you ever lived without it. It was like that for my first good helmet (a 90’s Arai NR-2), and it was like that with the Venture MC-50 12V Heated Insole.
I’d worn heated pant liners, glove liners and jacket liners before, but had never heated my feet. Now I’m not sure how I did without. On any long ride in the cold, no matter how many socks I wear, the numbness always starts at my pinky toes and works its way inward. Not so with the Venture Insoles. I plugged them into Venture’s MC-20 Heated Pants Liner (which has a built-in controller), and at low settings they were always the perfect temperature; subtle in their effect, but definitely no numb toes. At higher settings they can give you a bit of a hotfoot, but if it’s that hot you likely won't mind.
In their secondary role as an insole, they similarly excelled, offering better support than the standard insoles in my Alpinestar Soho boots. The Soho’s removable insole made it easy to cut the Ventures to fit; I just laid them on top of each other and cut around the outside, for a perfect fit the first time around. The wires extending from the back of th Ventures took some getting used to, but now I don’t even swap them out for the standard insoles, and barely notice the wire is there.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a big fan of the Insoles. In fact they're my favorite thing in the Venture lineup, even at $99.95.