Lab Notes

Down Jacket Colours for 2010-11

A sneak preview of the down jacket colours arriving later this year.

You’ve Got An Idea

So you have designed a robot that will catch you when you fall when climbing. Will Alpkit make it?

Girls sleeping bags

We already offer short, regular and long length options in our Skyehigh sleeping bag range, but do we need to go further and design a girls specific model?

High Perfoamance

The single most important thing in a boulder mat is the foam. It is the foam that absorbs the impact of falls. I’ve recently been learning more than is healthy about foam, with a view to improving and redesigning the boulder mat range. So, what makes the perfect bouldermat foam?

Figfour handle design

So why does Figfour have such small grip rests rather than a more ‘ergo’ style handle?

Why Change?

We’ve been working with our current manufacturer of mats for nearly 5 years. Over that time Alpkit has grown and matured and become a lot more stable. In the early days it was feast to famine, some might say it still is, but one thing we’re confident in, is that we can sell mats.. a lot of mats. Back then we always saw price as the key factor to all our products. That certainly helped Fat Airic become a legendary product providing our customers with some of their most comfortable nights’ sleep under canvas without busting a hole in their wallet.

Shiny Metal bits

We’ve approached DMM to to make a set of limited edition quickdraws to show we are serious about making serious gear. These aren’t cheaper than anyone else’s, they’re just a set of pretty good quickdraws with Alpkit on them.

Filo Jacket Woes

I’ve spent many a Spring in the villages and towns beneath Briton’s mountains looking at sale rails full of end of season down jackets. Walking around our warehouse now I see empty shelves where there should be boxes full of Filos. Most shop keepers would be rubbing their hands together and counting the cash in the bank if they’d had a down jacket season like us, so why do we think we can do better still?

Merino and CoolMax socks

Socks, everyone wears them. We’ll nearly everyone, even in the depths of winter with snow on the ground Dan still pops into the office in his slaps. Way back when, quite by accident we stumbled upon a company not far from us with an amazing heritage of making socks. We were originally looking for someone to knit a refillable chalkball for us, we were young and innocent back then. In the following years we have spoken to numerous sock manufacturers, been out to Asia and stockpiled sample socks with Alpkit written on them but we still kept being drawn back to the guys close by.

3D Gamma SPECS

3d lighting system developed for Shaggy and his attempt on the Iditarod race across Alaska.

Ethical Down Sourcing - Part 3

A look into recent claims that probably all the down you ever bought came from live plucked birds.

Helmet Mounting a Gamma Headtorch

Now the nights are drawing in cyclists are dusting off their night lights and hitting the trails under the cover of darkness. I used the pre-sales samples of the Gamma headtorch, mounted to my helmet,last year to illuminate my journey during the daily commute home. I am now using the Gamma as an off-road bike light every-time I blast my local trails.

Original Gourdon Hydration Bodge

To make a hydration exit hole in the original back system of the Gourdon Drybag for a bladder is pretty simple. Here’s what we did….

Hunka XL

The order has been placed with the factory and they should be here early in the new year.

Ethical Down Sourcing - Part 2

The 2nd part of an overview on initial research on down sourcing

Ethical Down Sourcing - Part 1

An overview on initial research on down sourcing

Recycling Down?

The Filium pullover we ran last spring was an experiment on 3 levels.

1) It was a new style of jacket we wanted to trial

2) The fabric used in the Filium was well received and is now the base fabric for the new Filo.

3) The down used in the Filium was recycled from a faulty batch of Filo’s.

We have been chatting at Alpkit HQ and wonder whether the recycling of down can happen on a bigger scale? Would you send us your old down products to be recycled in much the same way as the Patagonia capaline scheme.

Gamma Power Test

Alpkit product guy Jim loses the Alpvan and uses the opportunity to test out the luminosity of the new Alpkit LED headtorch.

Gourdon 20 Proto

Nicks been peddling this proto of a Gourdon 20 around for the last six months…. stock is on the boat and will be here in March.

Filos for Christmas

Fingers crossed we should be getting the new Filo jackets in time for Christmas. Here is the why, where and how..

coLAB08 deadline and award judges

Your last chance to submit your product ideas to Leo, Andy, Mark and Graham.

News from the Orient (part 2)

Better late than never I have finally put together the footage of the Carbonlite manufacturing process I filmed on a visit to China earlier this year.

SkyeHigh colours

Not long now until we take delivery of the SkyeHigh sleeping bags. Alpkit packing staff will receive supplimentary training to cope with the added product options.

Is bamboo the new cotton?

We are not sure, but we got ourselves some bamboo t shirts so we would have a better idea.

Colours preview 07-08

While Nick was cooking pies at last weekends PFAKS I snuck in to his lab and ripped a page out of his design book.

Sleeping bag plans

We are making some changes to our range of sleeping bags, here hopefully is an explanation of why, what, how and when.

Innov_ex 07 Conference

Why do companies keep rolling out new products each and every year? The sceptics may point a crooked finger towards consumerism, but let’s not forget the dedicated crew of design chaps and chapesses who wake every morning on the seemingly endless road called innovation.

New ergonomic Phud strap

New strap adds a touch of refinement to our best selling boulder mat.

The Good, the Bad and the Future

Are you active in the outdoors? Do you like getting your hands on limited edition kit and helping to develop it? Do you have a neck that cranes backwards when you overhear gear related discussions in public? You sound like a coLAB person.

Water resistant jeans

Somedays the postie brings us a package that turns a regular day into a mighty day. She didn’t disappoint us this week, we have just got hold of a pair of our water resistant jeans! These jeans have been in the pipeline for some time, it is one of our pet projects that has taken a back seat while we have concentrated on products that pay the rent.

News from the Orient

Nick and I are visiting all the factories that make products for us in China. This is my first time out here and Nick really has thrown me in at the deep end. No chauffeur driven cars from the airport to the factory for us, after landing in Hong Kong it was a 3 hour bus ride straight into southern China. I don’t think anything can prepare you for this journey. Just the sheer amount of people is crazy, for the price of a Travel Lodge we stay in 5 star luxury and my biggest fear, the food, has so far been ok. A close encounter with fried chicken feet proved to be a mix up of table orders!

Your big weekend

The Bank Holiday weather has been kind to us this year. We don’t need to measure it by rainfall or average temperature, we just count the number of Airic sleeping mats we have sold! We got set on wondering.. How do your Alpkit goodies fit into your big weekend manouvers?

New crash pad on test

With Phud we have been able to offer people the best value bouldering mat possible. Woomf wasn’t quite there as Jim has already explained in this post, but a lot of people have been asking us for something bigger, more durable, more expensive, more pad! So what is to come after Phud?

Pink Hunka

A lot of people missed our pre-production ‘Hunka’ bivi bag at the Outdoors Show. It may have had something to do with its subtle colouring so we thought we would just give it a little note here. If you have a bad reaction to intense colour please switch your monitor colour to monochrome before clicking.

Woomf

For the past 18 months the Woomf has been in the UK with the Phud. Unfortunately due to its size we cannot make it as value for money as the Phud and this in turn has effected its sales quite badly. For this reason we are going to move production of the Woomf off-shore meaning we can improve it, and reduce it.

Supply and demand

Offering sleeping bags in different sizes is a great idea so why is it we are we now out of stock of the AlpineDream Short and Long options? Unfortunately we have to play a bit of balancing act with stock sometimes, e.g we could guarantee to have stock if we only sold one model, in one colour of a particular product group but that’s not always what customers want. 

The short and long versions were a CoLab experiment, we wanted to offer these sizes but offer them at decent prices not the £30 extra that some of the other brand charge. We ordered them in, gave them go and hey presto sold out shortly after.  Our method of selling has not been done in the outdoor industry before and we don’t have the sales history to predict how quickly we will sell a product. Because we develop our products and purchase direct from the factory, our lead times for new production are not always as quick as we would like.

Online shopping and the environment

An interesting article skimming through some of the environmental effects of doing your shopping online. We try to do our bit here at Alpkit, just like we all do in our homes, but we can always do more. It seems to be an area in which there is very little current research to draw upon.

Patagonia extend CTRP initiative

Since 2005 Patagonia have been encouraging us to send back our worn out Capilene® undies to be recycled into new products. Now in the US they have gone one step further and are accepting Polartec® fleece garments from other manufacturers. So if you have any 90s Calange or Millet that can no longer be worn in public check out the Patagonia site to see how you can redeem your crimes to fashion.

5 yards of spinnaker

What would you do with 5 yards of spinnaker? Jay Ham shows he is handy with a sewing machine and knocks out a tarp, stuff sack and backpack in this BackpackingLight.com Make Your Own Gear series of articles. Subscription required but it does give you access to a lot of heavyweight articles.

Tubular snowshoes

Arriving a couple of days early for ICE we headed up into the ‘Haute Alps’ and took the chance to get some fresh air and try out some snowshoeing. These snowshoes had been kicking around the office for over a year and we thought it was about time to give them a chance to shine. I had used the plastic TSL and Grivel style snowshoes, the TSL model being my shoe of choice for the past couple of years, so I was interested to see how these tubular aluminium creatures would measure up.

First impressions were good, carrying them from the car to the snow they were light and they stacked together neatly which also allows them to be attached easily to a rucksack.

CoLab at ICE07

Last year the development budget stretched to cappuccino and sledging. This year the Alpvan will be driving through the night until it hits the Alps as we take our kit out in ‘real mountain situations’. Undettered by the poor early season conditions in the Alps this year, we are taking along a van full of gear to the Ice Climbing Festival in L’Argentiere, France. We are making up the numbers in the commercial village ICEXPO and although we will not be handing out axes, crampons and boots like the nice people at Petzl and Sportiva we may have a few items for you to try out.

Our down jackets should get a good work out as we stand drinking vin chaud below one of the many ice falls along the valley, and the bivouac on Saturday night will be an ideal chance to test the bivy bag, sleeping bag and inflatable camping mat combo. IceXpo gets underway on Wednesday and is usually open first thing in the morning, and then again in the evening after everyone has returned from the ice. It is the best place to meet up if you want to get your hands on our goodies, tell us what is wrong with it or buy us a beer

A Wet Summer Night’s Dream

Nothing can beat a night out under the stars but mountain weather can turn on a dime. Perhaps you are intrigued by tarps but can’t believe that rain isn’t going to blow up under your fly turning your favourite down bag into a pile of mush. Maybe you need a bivy bag.

Underneath the hood

First there was the Filo jacket and people were happy. Then we cut the arms off and the Filet was born, more choice and people were even happier. But all this was a prelude to the main event, so put your arms in the air and rejoyce as we sew on a hood and introduce the Fantom.

Descent of Tin Mountain

We have been keeping our eyes open for sometime for a niche product that maybe you will not have seen before, a product that would be a real treat to find in your stocking and much more exciting than a pair of socks. We have searched high and low and, adding a few signature Alpkit tweaks, we think we have it.

Body fuel

Phud Version3 (V3)

The latest version of our popular Phud bouldering mat has some great new features. Jim tells us where they are and why he put them there…

Crowdsourcing and design

Material glossary

Molecular Velcro

Fabric suppliers

Think smart - cover your head

Down sleeping bag in 3 lengths

New AD down sleeping bags developments

Rays Way

Balloon beds

Think before your pop..

Environmentally sustainable camping shelter

Plastic snow shovels warnings

Pigfat - obscure ideas on modern alpine food

Develop Woomf

Hearing that PHUD was having such a whale of a time around the UK boulders but struggling to fit into everyones car-boot, his smaller younger brothers are soon to make an appearance. Like all younger brothers they’ve got all the best toys. WOOMF is made from the same shell fabric as PHUD. His brother, ‘ARD WOOMF, is fully covered in Cordura, one of the worlds most durable fabrics and WOOMF BLING is something a little bit special featuring limited edition animal print shells.

Octamid

Lightweight Polaris tent

Alpkit playing cards

Help us create a fun set of playing cards

Base camp

Design a communal tent

Apollo2

Extend the Apollo family

Gravity Girls 2

Sketch book

Gravity Girls 1

New t-shirt range for the ladies

Filo development

We knew it was going to be possible to develop a down jacket as soon as we had got our AlpineDream sleeping bags off the ground. Having grown up with the super fluffy and practical Rab Kinder smock we rarely take a trip with out a down jacket tucked away somewhere.. summer or winter, we would feel naked without it!

Boulder mat 2

Choosing the foam

Boulder mat 1

Basic hinge format boulder mat for under £60