patagonias miracle jacket

Has down finally met its match?

Patagonia’s new synthetic Micro Puff Hoody may be the lightest puffy on the planet.

author: Kristin Hostetter

Publish date: Sep 6, 2017

publication: snews online (an outdoor products publication that in my opinion believes they know it all!)

NOW FOR THE ARTICLE.

Patagonia’s new synthetic Micro Puff Hoody may be the lightest puffy on the planet.

For years now, we’ve been hearing how synthetic fills are becoming more and more down-like: lighter, more packable, warmer. It’s become somewhat of a tired refrain, and one that many of us quickly write off as marketing hype.

Synthetics more down like finally coming from Patagonia tells me that people who are in the employ of Patagonia are probably in their 20’s because they have no knowledge of insulations particularly polyesters because the feel and lightness and warmth have been around since the 1960’s and with the ability to take continuous filament fiber and make it into a batting a polyester fiberfill surpassed down completely. It started with Polar Guard and then it became Climashield and both of these products were and are used to make Lamilite!!!

Enter the Patagonia Micro Puff. It fooled me, and I like to think that I’m not easily fooled, at least when it comes to insulation. Not only does the jacket weigh a scant 8.7 ounces (women’s medium, on my scale), it has that down-like suppleness, airiness, squishiness. When you put it on, it practically hovers over your torso—like only a down puffy can do.

It was not difficult to fool Kristin Hostetter because she has no knowledge of insulation even though she has been a writer in the outdoor industry for years. She is friends with all of these companies and will always write what they tell her. At 8.7 ounces as you will see Patagonia has done what I did not think possible; make a 45 degree F outerwear garment, it is almost a miracle.

Yet the Micro Puff is not filled with feathers, but PlumaFill, what Patagonia calls a “synthetic insulation that has a unique stabilizing structure featuring strands of heat-trapping ultrafine filaments that offer the warmth and packability of down but with the warm-when-wet performance of synthetics.” It’s constructed using a kind of hybrid quilted baffle—a seemingly random pattern of stitch lines and chambers designed to keep the fill stabilized, while at the same time allowing heat to move uninhibited throughout the jacket. It not only feels like a down puffy. Aesthetically, it looks like one, too.

PlumaFil I suspect is a contraction of pluma from plumage and fill from fill, clever verbiage, but meaningless. The quilt pattern is done on a machine just like the quilting machines I have, and I do believe I have the cam that will produce the same pattern, if not it is very similar. Quilting is NOT a hybrid baffle construction. The quilting is to keep the fibers in place so they do not fall to the bottom of the jacket or bunch up if the jacket is washed which will probably happen anyway. She has been in the industry long enough to know what a baffle construction is in a sleeping bag, and to the best of my knowledge the last company to make baffled parkas was Holubar, long gone from the industry. So the pattern is not random, her brain is. As for the ultra-fine strands of filaments, they are probably fine denier chopped staple polyester fiber so the best they can do is work at 45 degrees and higher, miraculous!!!

I brought the Micro Puff on a recent 9-day hike of the Tour du Mont Blanc, and wore it on every high pass and when night time temps in the Alps got chilly. I rarely had to even zip it up. Granted, I was not able to push it into temps much below 45°F, but I suspect it will go there. I also wore it over a tee-shirt on a blustery, wet day in Iceland, when the rain plastered my hair to my forehead, and never noticed a dip in warmth even after it was well soaked. At the same time, it doesn’t get clammy like many synthetic jackets do; it breathes.

You see a tried and proven 45 degree jacket, amazing. Since Yvon the owner of Patagonia is an active fisherman, I think that is all he does, he now has the perfect bone fishing garment when he goes to Key West or the Bahamas in July for his bone fishing expeditions. A jacket that breathes, another more amazing attributes maybe it is alive! Note that the temperature must have been above 45 degrees because she admits to not using it lower than 45 degrees.

Bottom line: So far I love this jacket, and it’s making me long for cooler temps.

I too long for cooler days since we have had a nice long Indian summer here, however if she thinks that this jacket which I expect was given to her is going to keep her warm as a stand-alone garment below 45 degrees she is sadly mistaken. As she says and I quote; “was not able to push it much below 45 degrees”.

Recently I have given thought to the way these very large companies that provide products to the consumer market that operate in the outdoor industry, and I have begun to think of them as having the Robin Hood syndrome. As we know from the story of Robin Hood and his Merry Men as the story goes they stole from the rich to give to the poor.

Companies like Patagonia have contributed to the under privileged but not in the U.S.A. but other countries around the world for many years from the profits that they have earned from sales of their products. The problem that I see is the fact that these companies offer lip service with the products they offer. I looked at the Patagonia web site and I was astounded to see a price of $299.00 for this garment. My jacket liner cost is $45.00 delivered to your house and it will do the same thing or better, but it is not as fashionable. My jacket contains Lamilite which made their product obsolete years ago. Since their product is made in Asia their margin of profit is incredibly high so they can make all the donations they want with the customer’s money. Robin Hood syndrome!

In the case of this product Patagonia is essentially claiming that it is somehow a product made with “new” insulation and a new construction method that is simply not true! They claim to have looked at everything (see their web site) and discovered this supposedly new insulation. What they have discovered is a new way to present erroneous information about the insulation component. They do not have a single employee in their firm and that holds true for every single company that makes outerwear in the industry that knows anything about insulations. If they did then they would all be using Climashield and it would be laminated. But these companies are run by bankers not people who know and understand the products they are offering to the public. I have said before and I will say it again; with the advent of continuous filament fiber in 1968 when it was called Polar Guard it made ALL other forms of insulation totally and completely obsolete; synthetic or down. Today the current product Climashield is literally as good as it gets and the laminated method that I use for my products construction has no match.

So, those of you who chose to support Robin Hood so to speak you are free to do so as we still live in a free country, but keep in mind that the products you buy will not perform as the advertising suggests.

But then again this new Patagonia jacket will serve you well bone fishing in the Bahama’s or Key West in July.

And last but not least down did not meet its match in 1968 it was bettered and over the years the continuous filament product available today “Climashield” has shown it is at the top of the insulation pyramid and everything else is at the base all running around like chickens without their heads, so they bump into each other continually. So they resort to erroneous verbiage to sell what they get made in Asia at high profit margins..

All comments and opinions are based upon my knowledge of materials and construction methods and how insulation performs!