Nomad Puffer

The puffer and pants work like a second skin

The aim of the Nomad Puffer and Nomad Puffer Pants is to get back to making cold weather clothing as precisely engineered as early man made it, while protecting you from the elements from head to toe. These early designs would have worked just like a super-soft second skin, regulating your temperature, while protecting you from the cold, wind and rain. We’ve combined a wind resistant and water repellent outer shell with super-compact insulation, hand-dyeing, and double lines of reinforced stitching to recreate the warmth, comfort and performance of the earliest Arctic clothing.

Feels lived-in from the day you get it

By changing the way you dye fabric, you change the way it looks and feels. Garment dyeing clothes after they’ve been built makes the fabric physically softer, so the puffer feels lived-in from the moment you first put it on. The colours you get from garment dyeing also make it look like you’ve been wearing the jacket for the last few years. That’s because when you put the whole piece of clothing in dye, the colours build up in the creases and in the stitching, but come out paler at the edges.

Each Nomad Puffer will be different

The garment dyeing process involves dyeing the puffers in small batches at very specific temperatures. And the effect of the dyeing can vary from batch to batch, and even from jacket to jacket. This means that no two puffers will ever look exactly the same. But it’s not going to come out bright green. It just means it’ll look like you’ve owned it for years from day one.

We use super-compact insulation

To keep you warm but still able to move fast, we turned to the same insulation we first used in our Race to Zero Puffer. Sandwiched in between the water repellent outer material and the inner lining is a super-compact synthetic insulation which keeps you as warm as much heavier and thicker jackets. That’s because we compress the insulation down to less than a third of its original size before it’s stitched into the jacket. And while the insulation takes up 70% less space, it retains 80% of its thermal properties.

Our insulation is made from recycled plastic

Instead of pulling feathers out of ducks, we pull plastic out of used plastic bottles and turn them into insulating synthetic fibres. Every single jacket uses 5 half-litre recycled plastic bottles. Staying warm is all about trapping as many pockets of air next to your body as possible, so these synthetic fibres are built to be hollow, which means you’ll automatically have millions of air pockets trapped next to your skin. And as the curl of the fibres traps more air than straight fibres, the microscopic texture of the fibre itself also retains heat.

How the insulation performs against down

While down traps heat well, it doesn’t breathe well. So it’s not the ideal option if you’re working hard. If you’re on the move our insulation will do a better job of regulating your body temperature, as it will breathe better and won’t hold onto sweat. It’s also made from a blend of different fibres each with their own ‘multi-shape’ structure. Some are designed for puffiness, others for resilience or thermal efficiency. By making each fibre a different shape, we stop them linking together and clumping like down does when it gets wet.

How plastic is turned into insulation

To turn recycled plastic bottles into insulation we work with pioneers in thermal insulation based in Milan. They’ve been working on recycled fibres and using plastic bottles in their technology since the 1980s, well before it was the cool or right thing to do. They use a process called mechanical recycling to blend the bottles, eliminating the need for hazardous chemicals and creating synthetic fibres that have the highest loft for the lowest weight, just like down.