Palmer: No, but we employ a lot of scientists on three different continents who will run all of our selected material through tremendous testing. It takes us 18 months to two years to build a garment from soup to nuts before you can buy it.Īnd then once you build it, what does the testing look like? Do you have a team of scientists? What are we excited about? What are we excited to share with our customers? We’re builders, that’s our viewpoint. We’re going to the market looking at what’s new, what’s great. They don’t have the menu in their head when they go shopping, but they find some produce that’s just outstanding and perfectly fresh at that moment in time and they bring it home and then they figure out what they’re going to cook with it. Whether it be a specific three-layer fabric or a two-layer fabric or boiled wool or something else that we’ll noodle on and determine, “This needs to be in our line.” So whether it’s the fabric or the yarn or the components that make up a product, we’ll fall in love with a source material. So we have fully supportive weatherproof gear and then mildly supportive weatherproof gear, depending on what you’re after, but we’re always looking to have technicality be sort of a buried asset within our gear. Palmer: So as far as weather protection, we are kind of all inclusive of everything that Mother Nature throws at you. How do you guys decide which weather conditions or elements that you want to protect against? So I then wonder if those same components that are used strictly in sailing could be somehow adapted and worked into our everyday protection. And, well, the only time I’ve been in a gale-force wind is when it’s been on a motorcycle in sideways rain. Somebody might need something if they are sailing in the North Seas, and we see a collar detail that keeps that sailor protected in gale-force winds. So due to that, what we are often finding is advancements in things outside of outerwear and we bring those advancements into outerwear - whether it’s from a protection standpoint or from a usability standpoint.
We view ourselves as designers first and foremost. Palmer: You know, we often say we started a design company and we just happened to choose outerwear. All of those things we can now take advantage of new sources of material that we can use to fortify the jacket even further so that it’s an understated, elevated, overbuilt product. All of the points of that jacket that touch your skin, whether it’s the liner or the rib at the wrist or around the interior of the collar. They weren’t making rib out of Merino, they didn’t have that capability. You’ve got this classic field jacket style, but you can tell that from a technical standpoint, it’s head and shoulders above what the originators of that style were able to do at the time. I feel like the Camber Jacket is a really good example of that. This is a fully technical, very classic piece that can live in my closet for a decade.” Where you recognize it, but all of a sudden you’re like, “But this is built bomber-tough. And if we can bring new technology into a shape that is more classical, we feel like that’s a really sweet spot for AETHER. Then we bring the modern-day fortification to it, the modern-day fit.
But to look back at some of the more classical pieces that have been good for decades, the kind of pieces you put in your closet and you don’t have to worry about them going out of season or out of style. So to look around our outerwear contemporaries, we get zero inspiration. They’re all following the same basic blueprint, which we don’t follow.
Everybody’s now wearing the same jacket, whether it’s Columbia or Marmot or North Face, they all look the same. I think we’re running into a problem right now with outerwear in general, that it all looks the same. We look to the past and sometimes our inspiration comes from how people used to solve weather problems. Palmer: We are inspired by things that have come before. InsideHook: Where does the inspiration for an AETHER piece come from?
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