Howdy, everybody?

Welcome back to another episode of Gear 30 on The Blister Podcast Network.

My name is Luke Kappa. I'm the managing editor here at Blister, and I'm coming to you from our home base in Elevation Hotel in Crestabute, Colorado.

As always, you can check out everything we are doing and reviewing over at blisterreview.com.

Now, today I am chatting with Brigham Crane, the product design director at Outdoor Vitals.

Brigham and the rest of the Outdoor Vitals team design a pretty wide variety of outdoor apparel and outdoor

equipment, and they take a pretty different approach from many other brands. While the company is

arguably most focused on the backpacking world, they've gained a strong following among folks who do

a ton of different outdoor activities, from through hiking to climbing, mountaineering,

backpack hunting, backcountry skiing, and much more.

So I was really excited to get Brigham on to discuss not only his perspective on this

and product design in general, but also his focus on designing for experiences rather than

highly particular use cases, as well as

as thoughts on why Outdoor Vital's gear has so much crossover appeal. We also get to dive deep

into one of Outdoor Vital's newest apparel collections, the Mountain Pursuit line, and it's

rather unconventional origins, where it started as a

collaboration between Brigham and the guys at Exo Mountain Gear, a very specialized

backcountry hunting backpack company.

Brigham gets to shed light on the extensive prototyping process for that collection,

including his thoughts on the current state of active

insulations and active midlayers, as well as the fascinating expe-dried down insulation that they're

using, which utilizes tiny gold particulates to produce a water-resistant effect that he has

...