I’ll confess I would have a nerdy admiration for ExpeDry down even if it didn’t work, just for its use of basic chemistry, which even I dimly remember from high school but for some reason never made it into a product until recently. What’s even better is that it does work.

I don’t have a lab, and I’m not particularly interested in what happens in one anyway, but I am a backpacker, living in a cold climate, with a deep dislike for being cold. In the real world, where I live, if your jacket loses loft and you get cold, bad things happen. In my testing, the Vantage jacket loses almost no loft throughout the day, even when I am active and sweating in it.

Better Than DWR?

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Outdoor Vitals is not the first to use ExpeDry. Marmot, Katabatic Gear, and many others also have various sleeping bags and jackets with ExpeDry down, but the Vantage is the first time I have noticed a real difference. The Vantage has less fill than several other puffer jackets I wear regularly, yet keeps me just as warm, if not warmer, thanks in part to very little loss of loft throughout the day.

Proponents of ExpeDry also claim that it will last longer than DWR coated down (whether chemically coated or wax coated) just because it’s not coated, and therefore will retain its loft longer. I haven’t used any ExpeDry down products long enough to put this to test yet, but based on my experience with the Vantage Alpine jacket and the way it holds loft under adverse conditions, this claim makes sense.

The second thing that Vantage uses to mitigate heat loss is Outdoor Vital’s Nova Zero Stitch fabric, which, as the name suggests, uses no stitches. There are still baffles to keep the down in place, but instead of punching thousands of little holes as you would stitching, the baffles and other seams are woven into the fabric. Where the conventional method has an inner and outer fabric that is then either stitched (or bonded/welded), the Zero Stitch fabric is two pieces that are woven together. It’s hard to visualize how this works, but Outdoor Vitals put out a video to explain.