For the past month, our FedEx delivery team has certainly earned their paychecks. On any given day between 10 and 30 giant boxes arrive at our door step; it's been a lot of heavy lifting for those pour souls. The contents, you ask? Gear. Loads and loads of next year's gear.

Although the 2012 Buyer's Guide won't land in your mailboxes until late August, the preparation began here in the office early in May. We've been on the phone with hundreds of brands, busting our butts to get as much darn stuff through these doors as possible.

Once it's all here, we spend a few weeks scrutinizing each and every product. From hard goods to soft goods, and everything in between, we select the gear that we know will suit you best.

Once we've sifted through the heaps of merchandise, we'll photograph all the products, write our reviews, design pages and layouts with Adobe InDesign, make it look pretty, and send it off to the press.

It might sound easy, but the reality is we'll be grinding away around the clock for the next few months. Each review will be torn apart, re-written, and torn apart again. We'll be fact checking, double checking, and triple checking after that. You can rest assured that the final product will have drawn blood, sweat and maybe even some tears from our staffers.

Keep a special eye out for the 2012 Editor's Picks. We've been pouring over the ski test forms from our All-Mountain and our Park Ski Tests, and combining our own knowledge of the products to bring you the cream of the crop.

And the Editor's Picks are not only reserved for skis; we'll be selecting the best products from each and every category of gear. Come fall, when you're juggling between jackets A, B, and C, you can look to the Editor's Picks to know exactly what's hot and what's not.

To get an advance copy of the Buyer's Guide before it hits newsstands, head on over to the subscribe page — https://freeskier.com/subscribe