Quechua’s principals of environmental awareness and responsibility, mixed with unmatched enthusiasm for the outdoors, has led to a variety of unique and highly functional products since its creation in 1997.

On a recent trip to Ben Nevis, Scotland, I tested Quechua’s 2Seconds Easy Tent to investigate the practicalities of a self-erecting tent and its performance in the typically turbulent Scottish Highland weather.

The one-piece tent – made from a folded figure of eight within a circular bag -certainly wasted no time in setting itself up. Within 2 seconds, the tent had exploded from our grasp and landed quite elegantly on the grass in front of us. All that was left to do was to peg in the guy ropes and crawl inside. Considering our late, moonlit arrival at our campsite at around midnight, it was a welcome alternative to the usual mess of connecting tent poles and tripping over tent canvas whilst struggling  to determine the way the tent might fit together.

This simplified tent design has also allowed a reduction in packaging and tent materials, one of Quechua’s key eco-design policies. Quechua prides themselves on their unique but straight forward approach to product innovation – where products are built around the aesthetics of their users and adapted to improve their comfort of movement, as opposed to simply providing a product that doesn’t exist.

The 2Seconds Easy Tent may have been easy to set-up in under two seconds, but unless you are a seasoned Quechua camper, expect a fiddly process of carefully folding the elastic frame together correctly so it may fit into its modestly sized container bag. This process may take anywhere between 20 seconds and 5 minutes. Either way, it certainly fits the bill of a ‘Do it yourself’ style of camping, where expensive and complicated equipment is usually unnecessary. Be it for festivals, camping sites or casual trekking, the 2Seconds Easy Tent is very appropriate in removing the hassles of a bulky or heavy tent with a lot of  smaller, additional parts.

Having said this, although we did not manage to directly experience the 2Seconds Easy Tent’s performance in high winds, its lack of guy ropes and relatively weaker structure suggests that a stronger and potentially stabler tent may be desired.

Useful information

Quechua’s 2Seconds Easy Tent can be found at Decathlon, starting at £64.99