But the industry is stuck in a fast cycle of seasonal drops and trend-driven designs.
Rebranded fabrics, asymmetric styling, contrast zippers, and seasonal colors? That's marketing, not progress.
So we do things differently. We take our time before we release a garment, and once we do — we only change that design when we can actually improve it.
Sounds suspiciously like marketing fluff, right? But if you buy a shell jacket from a traditional outdoor brand this winter, that product was on the design table two years ago and shown at trade shows last year. If you have comments after using it next winter, those comments are on a three-year-old product that's already retired. And even worse (if you ask us): that jacket was purposefully designed to be "new", with added details, technical quirks, conspicuous color settings. That's built-in obsolescence, fashion over function, and the very opposite of timeless.
Here's how we do it instead.
We can take our time before we release.
No retailers are waiting for our "new collection," so we don't have to fit development to a season. We make drafts, source materials, run tests, and build prototypes we take out in our backyard — the mountains of northern Scandinavia, which is a miserable place to test a jacket and an excellent place to find out if it works.
We can use the materials we actually want.
Without distributors and retailers, we can afford to invest more in the product. The best membranes on the market — breathable, durable and quiet. Down at fill powers most brands can't source. Sometimes we're actually the ones introducing a new technology: we were first with Aerogel as active insulation, and first to market with seamless stretch down. And we put a lot of effort into the things nobody sees: seam construction, reinforcements, lamination. Details most people won't notice, but that are expensive to do right.
“We could keep products in the line for years, improving them only when we genuinely found ways to make them better. ”
-25°C in the box at the Toray Technorama GIII Advanced Textiles Development Center in Otsu, Shiga, Japan.
Our design is minimalist, clean and purposeful.
Us being Swedish plays some part in that, but it's mostly about visual future-proofing. We call it reductive design — we actively reduce the number of visual elements on a garment, because the details that are easy to add to make things look exciting are the same ones that make a product age.
Then comes the launch, and at that point the product is the best we could do. Sometimes that's very good — the Merino Base took three years and won its test in Outside Magazine. And sometimes we get it wrong. Then we live with it until we've got something genuinely better.
Eventually there's time for an update, and those start in one of two places. Either our own people — staff, athletes, ambassadors — start saying the same thing about a detail, or customer service spots a pattern rather than a few random cases. They're all skiers, so they've gotten good at raising that flag. Or we find a new material, a new technique emerges, or we come up with a better way to solve the problem.
But the change has to be measurable in real use —
durability, breathability, handfeel, weight-to-warmth — and it has to be worth rebuilding the product for. A new recycled fabric is a good reason to start the process. If it doesn't perform, or it isn't durable enough, it's a no-go.
In practice: we developed the Ultralight Down Hood in 2015 and kept it unchanged for six years. In 2021 we updated to 2.0: a 100% recycled Japanese face fabric with better durability and better handfeel, more down for more warmth, and a roomier, slightly longer cut. Same idea, same colors, same place in the system — only better.
Here's what we can't do.
We put a stupid amount of effort into how a fabric feels, and you can't find that out from a screen. You have to trust us first and test us later.
Or you can trust someone else. Eleven years after we launched it, the Ultralight Down Hood has taken Backcountry Magazine's Editors' Choice twice — 2025 and 2026 — and Powder's gear editor called it "perhaps the best one I've found to date."
So if you're looking for a new down jacket, we might not have it.
But if you're looking for a great one, we might just have a few options.