Sneak peek at next year’s gear: ALLIED LOFTECH Summit Insulation
ALLIED Feather & Down hosted a press event in conjunction with the Winter Outdoor Retailer show last month. It brought writers and bloggers together to sample some of the companies down products integrated into brands such as The North Face and Spyder. They also suited us up with Tecnica Zero G Guide boots, Leki poles and gloves and Blizzard Zero G Skis. On day one we hit the backcountry of Brighton to test gear and search for pow, and we weren’t disappointed on either front. The skiing was pretty epic despite the storm that raged around us and the ALLIED products kept us warm and dry. Having just spent the previous night dining outside and sleeping in yurts it was good to know that our insulation was immune to moisture. For the full back-story on ALLIED Feather & Down products have a read of our full review here.
The big news coming out of ALLLIED Feather & Down for the coming season is their new LOFTECH insulation. While this isn’t a down product it is designed to mimic down’s best properties and improve upon the rest. LOFTECH is a synthetic cluster of water resistant fibres which mimics natural down. Like down LOFTECH’s clusters use varying sizes of fibres and provide better warmth and durability (from repeated washings). These clusters are able to trap air which provides the maximum amount of insulation value. In fact LOFTECH has been tested to provide more warmth than 600 fill power down, this is pretty impressive as the nearest competitor can only provide less than half this value.
We’re excited by this new synthetic fill and hope to see it in many brand’s garments in 2016/17 and hopefully we’ll get to test a few so we can tell you how it works in the backcountry.
Photo credit: Bjorn Bauer