It is important to start with the knowledge that almost all down sold to the apparel and bedding industries is a by-product of the food industry. It is estimated that down only accounts for 2-8% the total value of the bird. No birds are being raised solely for their down.

If everyone stopped buying down products, it would have no effect on the amount of birds being raised.

There are, however, significant concerns within the supply chain and ALLIED does everything we can to make sure all of our sources are using best practices for all animal husbandry. And if there are changes that can be made, we actively assist in making those knowing that at 2-8%, there is little incentive for these farmers and abattoirs to implement changes themselves.

The two most important issues we face is the sourcing of down coming from birds that have been force fed for Foie Gras or live plucked.

Force feeding

In parts of the world, farmers engage in a practice of force feeding duck and goose to enlarge their livers for the foie gras industry. Since a large majority of duck in Europe are raised for foie gras, this issue probably represents the biggest volume potential.

For years, ALLIED has rarely sourced any duck down from Europe for this reason. It is a relatively cheap and easy implementation for farms to switch production and there are issues within countries where this is legal for farms to engage in parallel production. The risk is high in these regions so we have chosen to source around the issue.

Live plucking

Live plucking is an abhorrent practice where older birds that would molt naturally have their down systematically ripped from their chests. While this practice is arguably the more sinister of the issues, it is also a very small percentage of the global supply at risk for this treatment – regardless of the misinformation perpetuated by the animal welfare groups.

Live plucking occurs where birds live long enough to seasonally remove the down. These birds will regrow the the down and thus remain at risk for further plucking the following season. The only place this can occur is within the parent farms where birds can live several years for the sole purpose of laying the eggs that go to market and raising farms for production of meat. In the industrial supply chain, birds go to the abattoir at between 8-11 weeks so there is no possibility of this practice to occur outside of these parent farms.

This practice can also only occur with White Geese. Other species can not handle this treatment and will die. And since the bird is far more valuable as a parent goose, killing the bird this way is counter productive. The practice also only applies to the industrial supply chain which accounts for only 50% of the global supply. The remaining 50% comes from a rural small farm supply chain where there is generally very little to no animal welfare risk at all.

While the industry-wide animal welfare standards are incredibly important to bring a level of assurance to consumers that the down inside a garment, pillow, comforter or sleeping bag has been sourced responsibly, there is a lot more complexity to down insulation than just where or how it was sourced. And even though the standards also ensure traceability, there is no real way through those alone for the consumer to really understand where the down inside their jacket came from – or what makes it unique.

For us, the standards are simply an insurance policy to now communicate some of the intricacies of the material to the end user. For far too long, the synthetic industry and animal welfare activists have been able to attack down and spread misinformation without the customer having any sort of outlet to learn more about the performance and sustainability value of responsibly sourced material.

That’s why, in 2015, alongside the release of the first RDS certified products, ALLIED launched TrackMyDown.com. The site allows the consumer to use the lot number on the jacket to learn more about all the important elements of the down inside their jacket – from source to cleanliness to complete content analysis – educating the consumer on what fill power is, why cleanliness and processing are so important to performance, and how these might reflect on the quality of the product in front of them.

With TrackMyDown you now have the power to better understand all the nuances of down and make a more-informed decision based on the performance and sustainability of the exact insulation inside the product.

Enter this Lot number

13150315388

ALLIED is able to provide just about any combination of specifications of conventionally sourced down. We regularly work closely with our partner brands to identify the exact specifications for their desired use. There are limitations on species for fill power and sourcing due to regional animal welfare concerns, but we have always found a solution for every partner.

Almost all duck down sourced by ALLIED comes from China as many of the duck farms throughout Europe engage in force feeding for the production of Foie Gras.

For products that might require extreme performance in unusual conditions, ALLIED pioneered water resistant down treatments.

The one Achilles heel that down is known for is its ability to perform when submitted to extreme moisture. It is not often that an insulation comes into such extreme contact with water, but even excessive amounts of humidity can wet-out the down, reducing the fill power and losing the ability to retain warmth.

ALLIED’s HyperDRY Water Resistant Down remains among the highest performing, and stands as the benchmark for sustainability in fluorocarbon free hydrophobic down treatments.

The compound in the HyperDRY treatment works the same way as traditional DWR chemicals by building carbon-hydrogen chains on the down cluster to decrease the surface tension, which ultimately causes water to bead and roll off. The difference is that the HyperDRY compound is completely flourocarbon Free.

Working closely with our chemical partners, we were able to develop a hydrophobic treatment that could not only provide performance without fluorocarbons, but also allow us to process material more sustainably. Competitors’ treatments rely on additional wash cycles applying the chemistry in a bath, which uses a tremendous amount of water and chemicals. We are able to process our material outside of our processing water supply so we can use far less chemistry, reduce run-off to basically zero and keep from contaminating our water so we can continue to recycle what is used.

Because not all down is created equally, it is important to understand how subtle differences in processing can make a significant difference in performance and longevity.

Many vendor sourced suppliers will process down extremely quickly and with harsh chemicals to get the material as clean as possible as quickly as possible in order to offer material cheaper. While this might provide a cheaper material for less expensive fast fashion products, these products will not perform as well or last as long as material processed correctly. There can also be a risk of contamination of down with PFAS which has implications for both the product and the environment where these chemicals are applied.

THE USE OF HARSH CHEMICALS

First, down has the potential to be amongst the lowest environmental impact of any material used in the entire apparel industry, but washing with harsh chemicals not only leaves traces of PFAS, but unnecessarily harms the local environments where these chemicals are used. Further, any material now run through these facilities will certainly show signs of PFAS for decades to come.

The harsh chemicals may get the down clean quite quickly, but they are also likely to strip the protein of the fat and oils needed to retain resiliency and return to loft after compression. The down may look fine in the garment on the rack, but a single season will often reduce the majority of this type of processed down to fiber – losing loft and warmth. Properly processed down should last for decades.

HOT FAST DRYING

Again, how the down is handled through the drying process can greatly affect the fat and oil on the protein the same way harsh chemicals can. In order to save money, suppliers will push hundreds of kilograms of down through extremely hot driers in order to cut down the overall processing time. What one is left with is either down with all the fat and oils burned off or material that is inconsistently dried that will cause issues such as mold while the down is stored and prepared for manufacturing.

It is critical to not only understand where your down has come from for animal welfare concerns, but also in how it was processed so you can rest assured that your down product will last a lifetime and has a significantly lower environmental impact than a synthetic alternative.

At ALLIED, we have always said that not all down is created equal. And what allows down to become such an incredible insulation lies in how the material was processed. Down can be sourced from some of the best – and even certified – farms, but how it is further processed is the difference between cheap down and feathers and a high quality, technical, sustainable and durable insulation.

Down is comprised of beta-keratin, which is a protein extremely similar to our human hair. When down is processed, it needs to be treated in a way that provides the necessary cleanliness, but while still retaining a precise amount of the natural fat and oil so that it retains its resiliency so it can take years of extreme compression and still loft back to its full potential to provide warmth and comfort. There is a lot of cheaper down sourced in the market that might even come with RDS certification, but that has been processed with harsh chemicals, bleach and dried extremely fast. While this may save a small percentage in cost, the insulation may provide clean test results and even look good in the garment right away. But after just a little use, this harsh processing will have taken its toll and the product will quickly start to lose its loft as the now brittle clusters quickly degrade into fiber.

This type of processing is also usually accompanied by the use of harsh chemicals that have extremely detrimental impacts on their local environments. The current down standards do not incorporate any form of chemical management so it is important to not only know where your down came from, but how it has been processed.

ALLIED has developed a proprietary processing method called DURAWASH which has long led the industry in sustainable processing and stands as the benchmark of cleanliness as tested by an independent third party laboratory. The DURAWASH processing is incredibly complex and consists of no less than 13 stages that includes constantly being run through magnets to pick up any impurities, unique drying chambers that ensure we do not overheat the down, vortices that help to reduce additional residue and filter out the finest clusters and proprietary dedusting bins to ensure only the purest down is shipped. The DURAWASH process also incorporates a complex water filtration system to ensure we are able to recycle all the water we use. Part of this filtration is a purification which helps soften all water so minimal detergents can be used. The detergents ALLIED uses have been developed with our long time bluesign® chemical partner to precisely clean the down with no harm to the environment.

In 2018, ALLIED was only the fourth company in the US to earn Palm Oil Free Certification

In 2013, ALLIED set out with The North Face and Control Union to build a much-needed industry-wide standard. With as much auditing that was already being conducted throughout the ALLIED supply chain, there still was not a singular industry standard with the appropriate stakeholders from which to audit against.

The RDS has the largest brands and global animal welfare groups as important contributing stakeholders and certifies that all birds come from farms that abide by the five freedoms of animal welfare throughout all aspects of their lives – including travel. The RDS also requires a level of traceability for those certified brands and is built upon the content claim standard. That ensures that any RDS labeled product has been audited and certified throughout the entire supply chain – from farms through manufacturing.

ALLIED US
RDS CERTIFIED BY by IDFL
IDF-23-495955

ALLIED CHINA
RDS CERTIFIED BY by CONTROL UNION
CUC-890844

The shape and composition of the down cluster^[01]is the key to its unparalleled warmth to weight.

Different from a feather, the down cluster has thousands of filaments radiating from a central point, and each of these filaments have barbs, much like the branches of a fir tree. These barbs connect with the barbs and filaments of the nearby clusters, creating a structural web of insulating air.

The natural brilliance of the down cluster is that it is able to fill a volume with very little material and incredibly low weight.

Each filament is just a fraction of the width of a human hair, and it is estimated that there are as many as 30 miles of these filaments in just one gram of down.

While widely misunderstood, there are small differences between the down clusters of the duck and goose^[02]. The goose down cluster tends to have longer filaments, a different barb shape and a unique fat and oil composition. This all makes the larger goose down cluster slightly more compressible and resilient when it comes to jackets or sleeping bags that need to provide as much warmth as possible with minimal weight. Both insulate in the same way and more often than not it is almost impossible to distinguish between the two.

The down cluster is composed of a protein — beta keratin^[03] — which is very similar to our human hair. Like our hair, it has fat and oils that give it bounce and resiliency. But again like our hair, proper processing, care and handling are needed to ensure durability, which can long outlive any garment.

As a by-product of the food industry, all down is sourced from domesticated birds with the exception of Eider down.

The species of goose found in the supply chain is Anser Anser f. Domestica which is a domesticated descendant of the Greylag Goose. Occasionally there may be other related regional species found in the rural supply chain.

For duck, the most common is Anas Boschas Domestica, descended from the Mallard. Other species throughout the supply chain include descendants of Muscovy ducks. It is important to note that ALLIED will not source from Muscovy ducks due to the difficulty in keeping them in captivity and the animal welfare issues that can arise from farming this breed.

There are slight differences between the quality of the species and regions in which they are raised. However, most of the marketing around quality stems from a time when most material was aggregated and now we find a lot more overlap in quality from Duck to Goose and from China to Europe.

In the industrial Chinese supply chain, there is a desire for a more tender meat, and due to that demand both duck and geese are younger when they go to be processed for food than their European counterparts. The average age of ducks are 8-11 weeks and geese are slightly older at 10 – 16 weeks.

In Europe, the preference is for a gamier tasting meat and there the birds are processed at older ages — 11 – 14 weeks for duck and 18-24 for geese.

The older birds will tend to grow more mature and larger down clusters, and when material was aggregated and simply sold as duck or goose down from these regions, a qualitative assumption was made that European goose was superior in quality to Chinese duck. And while in general that still is the case in terms of warmth to weight, we now can offer 800 fill power duck down from China that rivals goose down from Europe.

Sourcing from the collector part of the supply chain offers even older birds and larger down clusters. Many of these regions with collector sourcing also tend to be colder than industrial farms and thus, produce an extremely high quality down.

There is also a slight difference in both the shape of the cluster itself and the fat and oil content between species. Geese tend to produce down that has longer fibers which makes it generally more compressible for a given fill power. The fat and oil composition of the goose also gives it a slightly more durable nature when considered over several years.

For more on the supply chain, click here.

The extreme warmth-to-weight ratio that can be achieved by down is due to the size of insulating air pockets created. This is referred to as loft, and measured as “Fill Power”.

Fill Power is simply a measurement of the volume created by a given amount of down — in most cases, measured in 30 grams per cubic inch. The higher the fill power, the greater warmth to weight that material has. Down has an extremely linear warmth curve and can be used in many ways.

In theory, one could use half as much 1000 fill power down as one would need of 500 fill power to create a product of the same warmth but extreme compressibility. But there are also times where fabrics or designs might require a smaller down cluster to provide loft.

Most down is measured according to the US/IDFB method. This standard has proven to provide the most reliable and provide the most consistent results. Other global / regional standards may produce different fill powers due to small changes in methodology. Until very recently, the two biggest standards – the US/IDFB and the EU – both gave far different results for the same lot of down.

The EU standard at the time relied on a method of conditioning that was never as consistent as the US steam method. So while the fill power would always test “higher” under the US standard, the lack of consistency between tests for the preferred conditioning recently allowed for the EU adoption of the steam method – making the US and EU fill power results much closer than previously.

Down is a by-product of the food industry, and as such, most down comes from those countries that eat the most duck and geese. That’s why approximately 75% of the world’s down comes from China with the heavy majority of the rest coming from Central and Eastern Europe. This supply chain is one that has been around for hundreds of years and still has not changed much over the generations.

There are generally three different modules of the supply chain with each providing their own benefits and complexities – industrial, collector and parent farms. We estimate that the collector and industrial supply chains are fairly evenly split with the parent farms only representing 3-8% of the total global down supply.

Industrial Farms

Due to the age of the duck and goose supply chain, and the fact that many farms have been owned and operated by generations of the same family, the use of the word “industrial” in this supply chain refers almost solely to relative scale. While these farms have larger contracts with slaughterhouse groups and produce far more birds than the other farms in the supply chain, these farms are generally not at the industrial level and overcrowding seen in other poultry supply chains in other parts of the world. The norm on these farms is a location on large bodies of water with birds roaming free. Many times, larger goose farms act as a secondary use to the land. We have seen many farms on orchards with the fruit trees providing natural shade for the birds and the birds supplying fertilization – creating a surprising circularity.

Traceability within the industrial supply chain is far easier than the collector-based module, but this is where one has to be careful from an animal welfare perspective. In many parts of Europe, force feeding is the norm. You’ll probably never see French duck down from ALLIED for this reason.

Collector based est 49% of Global Supply chain

This supply chain is a maze of collectors that gather material from micro farms sometimes as small as a single household raising birds to feed their family. Collectors travel from house to house within a village collecting all the waste products left out to be picked up – the down and feather from the birds being one. The village collectors will then usually aggregate material with a larger village collector who then transports to a regional collector where material is further aggregated and ultimately purchased and shipped from there.

These small farms and households raising down to simply feed their families have almost no risk to animal welfare (if the birds are harmed, they don’t eat), but can be incredibly hard to trace due to their small size and rural nature.

We have been able to add traceability in this supply chain by opening offices in these rural parts of the world where this supply chain resides that teach the collector communities how to read and write so the proper paperwork can always accompany the collection of the material.

The collector based supply chain is important as it not only has almost zero risk of animal welfare issues, but provides some of the highest quality of material as the birds are much older and produce a large and strong down cluster.

The Parent Farms est 2% of Global Supply chain

Within the industrial supply chain are farms where mother geese and ducks are raised to lay eggs for trade. These parent farms represent approximately 3-8% of the global supply chain. At the end of their cycle after 4-6 years, they become part of the food supply chain.

Even though the down we collect would otherwise be waste from the poultry industry, we feel it is our responsibility to also account for the welfare of the birds. There are two particular animal welfare issues that are endemic to our industry. The first is the horrific practice of live plucking, and the other is collecting material from birds that have been force fed for the Foie Gras industry.

LIVE PLUCKING

The most egregious and shocking practice is the collection of material through the live plucking of the birds. Down is not unlike the undercoat of a dog which older birds will periodically shed or molt. This material, in the past, was collected by hand and referred to “hand collected” down. The down naturally shed by the birds can be extremely high quality with extremely large strong clusters.

As certain farmers realized the value of this material, it degenerated into a practice where the down is picked from the birds, feathers and all, whether they are naturally shedding or not. This is extremely harmful to the birds and a practice we have always abhorred.

Most birds in the industrial farms go to processing for food at between 6-8 weeks for Duck in China and 12-16 for Goose (both are slightly older in Europe). In the vast majority of the supply chain, there is no possibility for live plucking since the birds are so young at time of processing. Live plucking only has the possibility to happen on parent farms where the birds are allowed to live for several years. But even at that, there has only ever been evidence of this happening at White Goose Farms. So considering the global supply chain, it is 1/4 of a small percent of the total farms that is even at risk. It has been estimated that only 1-2% of the down supply chain is at risk for this practice. And the material collected will always test at 800 fill power or above. Because this is the higher value down, anything that is not white goose down above 800 fill power isn’t even at risk for this practice.

FORCE FEEDING

The other practice we, at ALLIED, have long made a commitment to not source is from birds that have been force fed for the foie gras industry. At the end of their lives, these birds are forced to gorge on a diet of corn which makes their livers extremely fatty. Again, this is an exaggeration of a naturally occurring process whereby birds in the wild will overeat in anticipation of a long journey as they migrate. The practice of forcing the birds to feed, however, has become a practice that covers most duck supply chains through central Europe. ALLIED has made the commitment to never procure from farms that engage in this practice at any point throughout the year.

Aside from those two unique issues we deal with, we continue to work with farms to improve the lives of the birds and constantly reconsidering what “best practices” mean to animal husbandry.

In 2014, the Responsible Down Standard, developed by The North Face and ALLIED, was published and gifted to Textile Exchange for use by the entire down industry. It’s robust requirements and auditing immediately set it up as one of the most significant animal welfare standards in the entire textile industry. Soon thereafter, other standards were launched and some that had existed prior were re-written to become much stronger.

There are other small standards, but none with the scope and scale of the RDS. ALLIED does, however, work with brands to develop robust sourcing stories that exceed any existing certification.

The Responsible Down Standard

Developed by ALLIED alongside The North Face and Control Union and gifted to Textile Exchange in 2014, the Responsible Down Standard stands as the most robust scalable animal welfare standard for down. It ensures that all material is traceable and sourced from farms audited to all Five Freedoms of animal welfare and prohibits the collection of material from live plucked or force fed birds. No certified farm is allowed to engage in these practices whether down is sourced from those birds or not.

The RDS is based on the Content Claim Standard which means that all points of the supply chain – from hatchling farms through product manufacturing and distribution – require certification in order to label any product with the RDS logo.

ALLIED US
RDS CERTIFIED BY by IDFL
IDF-23-495955

ALLIED CHINA
RDS CERTIFIED BY by CONTROL UNION
CUC-890844

Click on the downloads to learn more about the labeling guidelines and current standard requirements and visit responsibledown.org for additional information and assets.

ALLIED Feather + Down has accredited down and feather testing laboratories in our facilities in Los Angeles and Hangzhou, China. The technicians are amongst the most experienced in the world with at least 20 years of down and feather testing with our primary technicians in California.

Having accredited testing labs at our main facilities helps maintain the quality and cleanliness our partners have come to expect. Every raw material lot is tested for quality, content and banned substances that can occasionally be found in material collected from some regions (most often the result of a contaminated water supply). And at shipping, every production lot is further tested to ensure the highest quality material is being shipped for our partner brands.

Our internal labs all provide the following down and feather tests.

• Fill power
• Content analysis
• Turbidity
• Oxygen
• Fat and Oil
• Water Resistance
• PFAS

In order to identify general quality, down is testing through a number of different parameters – Content, Cleanliness and Fill Power.

Down testing has been done in the same way for the past fifty plus years and much of the testing to this day is done manually and by eye and subjective interpretation. That is why it is important to always test with labs that have a long history of down testing. A tester that isn’t intimately familiar with the material might mis-classify a cluster as a feather and that can have a dramatic impact on how it needs to be labeled.

While it has been regularly verified that down has the highest warmth to weight potential of any insulation, it is also difficult to identify exact warmth metrics for any particular specification or fill power. What makes down such an incredibly wide ranging insulation also makes it very difficult to establish a static warmth number since it can be used in so many different ways; creating either a lightweight layering piece or heavy 8000 m parka with the exact same material. Many brands and customers want to see comparisons, but it is important to understand how warmth is usually measured and why this can be misleading.

The normal method for testing warmth is CLO (TOG being another). The CLO measuring system was developed to simplify thermal resistance and measure entire clothing systems.

Generally, panels or blankets are built and laid upon a plate that measures the stability when air is blown over top. The testing machinery measures the thermal resistance of the material on top and formulas are used to determine final CLO number.

THE PROBLEM WITH CLO

One of the biggest problems with CLO measurements in general is the formulas used to determine the CLO from the thermal resistance. While comparative testing can be down within singular labs, It can be grossly misleading to simply compare CLO values with no understanding how they were measured.

Additionally, the entire construction of the blanket used has a measurable effect. Fill weights, stitching lines and fabrics themselves all contribute. So unless everything is the same, to look at a simple CLO value from different sources to compare materials, will likely never be accurate.

And with down, even simply isolating the material, the fill weight has a tremendous effect in the resulting CLO. There is no industry standard for testing insulations for warmth so depending on how much down is being tested, the result will vary. This is why ALLIED will never claim a CLO value for any individual quality and why we think marketing communications like “as warm as down” are grossly misleading.

If brands want to understand and quantify warmth for their garments or sleeping bags, it is necessary to test the final products or within comparative testing for equally built prototype panels.

This is also why it is always impossible to answer the seemingly simple question, “Will 800 fill power be warm enough for …” without a knowledge of the entire holistic product.

The cluster ratio you normally see is a percentage of down cluster to everything else. Normally, for ease of communication, this “other” is represented as feather. But in reality, a 90 / 10 down, for example, will actually have very little “feather” in it. Using a Montane lot and looking at the TrackMyDown.com report for lot number 13150315388, you can see in this 90 / 10 lot, we see 95.6% down cluster, 2.0% down fiber, 0.8% feather fiber, 1.5% waterfowl, 0.0% landfowl, 0.0% quill and 0.0% residue.

To explain the different elements, the content analysis is broken down as follows:

STEVE URETSKY ceo & founder

Steve Uretsky^[01] founded ALLIED in 1987 after many years in the down industry. At a young age, eschewing an education in medicine, Steve chose to go to work for a feather and down company, where he learned about the finer qualities of down and the immensely complicated supply chain. At the time, the down industry was a maze of middlemen and collectors. When it was time to venture out on his own, he knew there was a better way to source – and with that, ALLIED was born. Steve remains a critical part of ALLIED, and those early ideas about dealing directly with the sources have helped build ALLIED as the premier supplier of responsibly sourced down worldwide. To this day, ALLIED also uses a unique processing method based on the environmentally sound plan Steve implemented 30 years ago – even then ALLIED was ahead of the industry on “green” issues – which helps the brand also remain the leader in environmental impact.

DANIEL URETSKY president

After earning his law degree from Georgetown, and working four years as a litigator, Daniel^[02] returned to join the family business in 2010 as General Counsel. In his years at ALLIED, Daniel’s business-savvy and socially conscious leadership has helped ALLIED expand its already prestigious partner base, which now reads as a veritable who’s who in the outdoor and home fashion industries. And now as President, he has piloted a wide range of environmental impact efforts and advocated for animal welfare initiatives in house and across the industry – even spearheading what has become the industry’s largest animal welfare standards like the RDS and TDS, etc. He also sits on many working-group boards to ensure the entire industry is engaged in best responsible practices even if it means going against the grain.

JONATHAN URETSKY chief operations officer

As with Daniel, Jonathan^[03] began his career outside the family business, working as an analyst at a Global Hedge Fund after receiving a Master’s Degree in Accounting. But he too soon returned, and since joining ALLIED, Jonathan has focused on operations and production throughout their multifaceted platform. He has been instrumental in overseeing ALLIED’s vast certification efforts, and works closely with farms, hatcheries and collectors throughout the global supply chain, ensuring ALLIED is always at the source of the supply. His work has led the brand to continue seeking and uncovering new supply chains offering higher quality, warmer, responsibly sourced down than was thought possible even just the season prior. He’s even active on social media so colleagues can to follow and learn from him as he documents his supply chain visits.

After 30 years of processing some of the highest performing and cleanest down in the world, we have worked with our bluesign® system chemical partner to develop a home laundry detergent to get the down inside your products as clean as the day it left our facilities. And we have done all this without using palm oil derivatives and with detergents that are completely safe for the environment. When you are using the world’s most eco-friendly insulation, equal care should be taken with the products used to clean it.

There are other “down washes” on the market, and we have found that most of them do a good job at cleaning the garment and protecting the down. They do this by using very little active ingredient to keep from stripping the fats and oils. These all come from chemical companies that may understand the chemistry behind cleaning fabrics, but don’t have the experience and knowledge of cleaning down that we do. Down, as a natural material, can quickly grow mold, bacteria and other allergens if not properly cleaned. It can also be stripped of its natural resiliency and insulating characteristics if cleaned too harshly. It was our goal to create the best detergent for the cleaning of the down itself. This required a lot of work to reformulate our renowned production detergent for home use. The goal was to create a detergent with a high concentration of an active ingredient that attacked the dirt, mold and grime down can collect after use. If you purchase a down-specific detergent, you expect it to actually clean the down, not just the face fabric.

We have also worked with our friends at Juniper Ridge, who have foraged and locally distilled an essential oil from our California backyard to provide a slight scent that reminds you of waking up in a forest near the ocean’s edge. The ingredients are responsibly foraged and hand distilled here in California.

Contact us for for wholesale purchases.