This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Eddie Bauer.

It was a real person, a fishing guide actually.

He started experimenting with down jackets back in 1936.

There is nothing better than down insulation in terms of thermal efficiency.

We still haven't found a way to make anything better in the world of apparel.

This is Damien Wong, head of design and merchandising at Eddie Bauer.

And here's the problem that Damien and his team have been trying to solve.

Down may be the best insulator that we have, but it's not perfect.

It's clusters of feathers. And if you put feathers inside a normal jacket,

they just float around and clump up near the bottom, leaving, say, your shoulder is cold.

So for the last hundred years, in order to hold the feathers in place

jacket makers have been quilting the jacket sewing rows of horizontal stitches into

the insulation. It's the reason that every down jacket looks basically the same.

You are putting what amounts to over 10,000 holes in a jacket that's meant to keep you warm.

But now, for the first time, Damien and his team at Eddie Bauer

have figured out how to eliminate the quilting problem.

It's called thin down.

And what it does is to spend the fibers

in a kind of three-dimensional structure.

Instead of free-floating clusters, the inside of the jacket looks like a sheet of cotton.

You essentially get the ability to create a down jacket with no holes in it.

And it turns out that 10,000 tiny holes make a huge difference.

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