The Puffy Purveyor of Warmth

While the down jacket has now well and truly transcended the world of high alpine mountaineering, there are no prizes for guessing its origin. Perhaps more surprising though, is the geographical location from where that spark of inspiration first came. The icon of alpine clothing actually originates from the hottest and flattest continent on Earth.

The story leads back almost 100 years, to George Finch — a farmer’s son, from a small town in New South Wales who, in the race to be the first person to climb Mount Everest, became rival to George Mallory.

In 1922 he was invited on Britain’s first Everest expedition but the choice was a controversial one. Having moved to Europe with his family, he gained a huge amount of experience, quickly climbing many of the iconic peaks in the Alps. In doing so Finch opted for the more challenging and dangerous routes, earning him a reputation as something of a maverick. Despite the audacious nature of his ascents, Finch was too brilliant not to be invited, and for the expedition, he invented two iconic mountaineering technologies that are still used in the highest mountains today: bottled oxygen and the puffer jacket.

This first iteration of the insulated puffer was bright green and constructed from fabric taken from the shell of a hot air balloon, filled with the feathers of the eider duck. But the design was too unconventional for the gentry of the Alpine Club, as was the use of bottled oxygen and Finch was ridiculed for his creations.

After being seen to repair his own boots – something well beneath the aristocratic classes of the Alpine Club — Finch was ostracised and the expedition banned the use of supplementary oxygen. Colonel Edward Strutt, the expedition deputy leader who’d later become president of the club was heard to remark, ‘I always knew the fellow was a shit’

But Finch’s innovation didn’t go totally overlooked, and eventually his jacket caught the eye of John Noel, the expedition’s photographer. ‘Finch, who had a scientific brain, invented a wonderful green quilted eiderdown suit of aeroplane fabric. Not a particle of wind could get through,’ he wrote in his diary.

For decades though, the outdoors has been an industry led by performance and feel above all else. Until relatively very recently, brands overlooked the environmental and ethical impacts of manufacturing as well as the life cycle of those products. 

‘For the last 35 years I have done my very best to consume only organic food, especially when it is food from animals,’ explains Tom Strobl, Managing Director of Mountain Equipment in Germany. ‘For the last 33 years I have lived mainly from the sales of down sleeping bags and down jackets. It took me quite a while to think about the animals that deliver the down. Shame on me. I then realised that I can make a much bigger difference if I do my very best to help establish ethical sourcing for our down.’

In 2009, the brand took to redesigning their down supply chains in order to address environmental, ethical and welfare concerns in a project that would later become known as CodeX. The objective was to place animal welfare and sustainability first in all their down insulated products, developing best practice, backed up by comprehensive and transparent auditing.

But, as is the case with most things worth pursuing, it was a bigger challenge than they had first perceived. Largely a bi-product of the meat industry, tracing down is not simply a case of locating the responsible farm, instead it’s a complex network operating at numerous different levels.

‘Indeed a typical down supply chain doesn’t exist, and that’s where the real difficulties began,’ explains Dr Matt Fuller, Product Engineer at Mountain Equipment. ‘One supply chain might have had a mother goose farm, a couple of subsidiary farms, and then a slaughterhouse and down processing plant. Another supply chain might have had two down processors, and multiple slaughterhouses each fed by hundreds, if not thousands, of small farms. Some supply chains relied on a collector-based system with workers riding scooters collecting hundreds of grams of down at a time from rural smallholdings spread out over whole provinces and then taking it to one central processor.’