Sitka Studios Wants to Use Cutting-Edge Apparel to Sell You on Conservation

Who makes the most advanced outdoor clothing? Ask a skier or a hiker, and they’re likely to name some familiar brands. Ask a hunter, and they will probably tell you Sitka Gear. I tend to side with the hunters.

Sitka Gear has been at the forefront of technical innovation in apparel that keeps you warm and dry when you’re in the field hunting game. And its latest jacket, the Sitka Studio Hyperdown Parka, represents a massive leap forward in a wide range of performance metrics, from weight, to warmth, to its price tag, and even its impact on the environment.

Perhaps most surprising about the jacket is the origin story. It is the brainchild of Sikta’s creative director, Brad Christian, who also happens to be a friend of mine. For the last few years it’s been Brad’s job to design logos, not clothes. Even more surprising, the Studio Hyperdown Park is designed for wear through travel and in cities, not for hunting.

“I don’t want to wear my camo hunting jacket to a bar anymore than I want to wear my ski goggles to ride my horse on a sunny day,” Christian recently told me. “Just like there’s a right tool for a job, as a creative director, I believe there’s a right aesthetic too.”

Sitka, where Christian has worked for the last nine years, is owned by W.L. Gore and Associates, the multi-billion dollar parent of Gore-Tex, the biggest of those technology suppliers. And that gives him a few more resources than most other creative side projects. Sitka already serves as sort of an off-site creative lab for Gore. Running a side project within a creative lab means Christian has total freedom to use Sitka Studio to create exactly the kind of products he wants.

Making a Groundbreaking Jacket that Won’t Break the Budget

Two things make the Sitka Studio Hyperdown Parka special: its down and its shell. But what really defines the jacket is the way those materials work together.

Fill power is a measure of down insulation’s compressibility. Because it’s common practice for traditional parkas to use heavyweight canvas shell fabrics, which don’t facilitate packability on their own, there’s no need to use high fill power downs.

Christian turns that practice on its head with a lightweight 60-denier nylon ripstop shell he sourced from Japan, that’s about 10 percent the weight of most parka shells, and to which he applies Gore’s new ePE (expanded polyethylene) Windstopper membrane. That material is PFAS-free (a forever chemical with a long list of negative impacts on human health), and stronger than older ePTFE (expanded polytetrafluoroethylene) membranes, which means it can be made thinner and lighter. All that adds up to less pollution, a shell fabric that’s just as strong as those used in existing parkas, and which has the added benefit of minimizing convective heat loss.

But a lighter, more packable shell wouldn’t do much on its own if it wasn’t used to house a very compressible down. For that, Christian used his parent company’s gravitas to knock on the door of Allied Feather + Down, another industry-leading innovator and supplier. One new technology they’ve been working on is a less polluting, more effective alternative to the Durable Water Repellent coatings that enable down clusters to resist moisture, and quickly dry should they get soaked, retaining the material’s ability to provide insulation. And believe it or not, that new treatment is gold.

Allied has found a way to bond microscopic gold particles directly to down clusters. Versus existing DWR treatments, that results in dry times one-third to half as long as toxic predecessors, according to that company.

Christian sourced 900+ fill gold-bonded down from Allied, the most compressible insulation commonly available for outdoor clothing, then ordered 230 grams of it for each of his parkas (in a size medium). Given that he designed a butt-length parka that’s a little shorter than most designs in that space, and went without a hood to make it more travel-friendly, that results in several times the volume of insulation packed around your torso and arms versus the parkas you’re used to.

All that probably sounds pretty expensive. But by leveraging Gore’s supply chain, Christian was able to bring it all to market for just $499. That is less than half the price of a typical high-end parka.

“Gore? I mean they’re in the International Space Station, they’re in space suits, they’re the most technical company out there from a scientific perspective, which is why it’s so fun to be able to call these guys up,” Christian says. “I’m a wannabe gear nerd compared to these guys, they’re actually in a state-of-the-art lab, developing technology at an insane level.”

Can a Jacket Attract More People to Hunting?

Now Christian wants to use Sitka Studio, and the brand’s platform as an authority in hunting apparel, to sell the general public on hunting and animal conservation.

Christian has previously focused Sitka Studio on collaborations, working with Gibson to design a custom guitar for Thomas Rhett, The James Brand to create a chef’s knife intended for hard use outdoors, and with Black Diamond to put Sitka’s camo pattern on set of snow shells. Neat creative endeavors that put the brand in front of new audiences, but it’s with his first ground-up clothing design that Sitka Studio has really become a creative force on its own.

“As hunters, our lives authentically depend on our gear to keep us where we have to be to do what we committed to doing,” Christian explains. “We’re so super focused on the technical need for the most extreme situations because, when we get dropped by a plane in the Yukon, and we’re going to stay there for three weeks on the side of a mountain whatever nature has for us, we don’t have anything else to fall back on.”

It’s that authentic requirement for peerless functional gear that Christian thinks the world outside of hunting will be open to learning about.

“Hunting has long been on an island,” he says. “Hunting content talks to hunters. Hunting product talks to hunters. But this isn’t just another sport, it’s the OG lifestyle. Hunting’s story is the story of human connection to nature.”

“Steven Rinella is really good at articulating a case for hunting,” Christian continues. “That’s his way of doing it. Well, my particular ability for doing that is as a creative director.”

“This is about writing a love letter about hunting to the rest of the world,” Christian explains.

Wes Siler is an adult onset hunter who’s always trying to learn more about animals. You can read more about the surprising ways in which animal conservation works in benefit of biodiversity by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.