A single outdoor jacket that can be used for multiple sports at the same time. Jaap Vriesendorp hopes to conquer the market with it.
Jaap Vriesendorp developed a jacket you can use for multiple sports. He worked on it for a year and now the jacket is on Kickstarter. As of the last time we looked, he had already raised over 64,000 euros.where he was looking for an investment of 15,000 euros.
Vriesendorp came up with the idea while skiing and climbing in Japan and Indonesia. He suddenly wondered why there was no jacket that could be used for multiple sports and activities. On Sprout, he explains that he found it annoying to keep buying a new jacket. "Firstly, those are super expensive, and secondly: then I have to have another coat when I want to have less stuff in my bag. And it's bad for the environment if I have another coat made."
Opposite
In his search for the perfect product, he came across a recurring problem that he thought could be solved: many light materials used to make jackets were not strong enough, but a waterproof jacket, in turn, cannot breathe properly. For his own design, called the One Shell, he used (for the outer layer) a material that is 15 times stronger than steel and therefore can also last 10 years. It incorporates a type of fibre (Dyneema) that is also used, among other things, in the nets where Boyan Slat cleans the oceans of plastic with his Ocean Cleanup. It is also used in many sails of sailing ships. To Sprout, Vriesendorp says that you can "leave a car hanging from it, so to speak".
To add warmth for hybrid and active conditions, the team has developed a layer using Polartech Alpha©, a material originally conceived for the US Special Forces. It is this layer that keeps the user warm without sweating. To create extreme warmth, a third layer, The Freeze, has been developed. This features Primaloft insulation and synthetic down. It also features aerogel technology developed by NASA.
During the design and development process, the jacket changed regularly. Design details were abandoned and the functionality of the jacket in particular was optimised. The fabric used comes from the Netherlands, Spain and America but the jacket is produced in Vietnam, we read. According to Vriesendorp, the quality of the machinery there is incredibly high. "We laser-cut the jacket, for example, instead of cutting with scissors," he told Sprout. "We work with ultrasonic welting (ultrasonic welding, ed.) in the process. That combination of techniques is hard to find in the Netherlands."
Price
Interested parties (there are already over a hundred of them) pay 449 euros on Kickstarter for the outer layer and 199 for the two inner layers. All together, the set costs 799 euros. According to Vriesendorp, most of the costs are in production and materials and a bit in logistics. The final score on Kickstarter will also partly determine what the final selling price of the jacket will be.
Source: Kickstarter/Sprout.
Photo: YouTube One Shell
