Posted by Jerry Wigutow on Jan 29th, 2016
Today a woman came into the Wiggy store for the purpose of buying a mated set of ground pads. I noted she was wearing not one but two quilted garments both products of the Patagonia Company. I asked her why; her answer was “it was necessary since just the jacket by itself did not keep me warm.” I was not surprised by her answer. See the picture below.
This winter the weather in the Grand Junction area has been on average from 15 degrees in the morning, say 6 AM when I get out with my dog to high 30’s during the day. Considering the temperature I would expect this outer garment to be fine but as I have written in the past all of these garments that have small quilt patterns cannot perform as well by a very wide margin as the same weight garment that I make which is not quilted. As a matter of fact, my Lamilite Supplex sweater is used regularly as low as zero degrees. It is about the same weight. The proof is in the pudding.
Another thing that I have noted about these light weight garments is the name of the manufacture on the breast or back shoulder of the garments. You see it on Patagonia, North Face, L.L.Bean, R.E.I., Arc’teryx, need I mention more. When people come into the Wiggy store wearing one of these garments I ask if when they bought it if they were compensated by the company for being a bill board for them. Note the company name is always embroidered on, versus years ago when the name was on a patch that was sewn on. Back then when people bought a Patagonia garment they would cut the thread to take it off. Much harder with embroidery.
When people come into Wiggy’s wearing one of these bogus winter jackets tell me the same thing, but this is the first time I have photographed someone. I may do this in the future so you can see the garments so you will know what not to waste your money on.
The tragedy as I see it is that every one of these companies can buy the Climashield as I do, and have me convert it to Lamilite so they will then be able to say the same things about their garments as I do. Unfortunately they would then have to ship the material to some Asian country for manufacturing and that is not going to happen. The same thing holds true for the boot industry since probably 80% (only a guess on my part) of all the boots sold in the USA come from Asia as well.
One thing I did not do is check to see what the insulation in these garments was, polyester or down, not that it matters.