The Evertherm Down Jacket

From near-death experiences to the top of the world and now ground-breaking Italian technology, the story of Eddie Bauer’s insulation innovations just keeps getting better.

When Eddie dreamed up America’s first down coat, the Skyliner Jacket, after an ill-fated winter fishing trip in 1935, he didn’t know it would herald a new era of lightweight, durable insulation.

Since then, Eddie Bauer has designed the first down flight suit worn by the US Armed Forces, the first down parka to summit 8,000-meter peaks in the Karakoram and Himalaya, and now the EverTherm, the first ultralight jacket made with down fabric rather than loose feathers.

A DOWN REVOLUTION: THINDOWN^®

Goose down owes its ability to keep you warm more to what isn’t there than what is. Each cluster of feathers is an open, three-dimensional structure that traps air in place. When you gather thousands of down clusters together, they create an interlocking latticework that traps a high volume of air. Your body heat then warms the air trapped in the down, surrounding you with a layer of your own warmth.

Beyond its heat-capturing qualities, down is also one of the lightest, most compressible, and most resilient insulations available. Because most of the volume of a down jacket is just empty space, it can compress to a fraction of its normal size. When uncompressed, the down clusters spring back into shape without losing any of their original insulating capacity.

Up to this point, down jackets have used feathers in their natural state of individual clusters. These clusters, thousands at a time, must be held in place using baffles or quilting to prevent them from settling and creating cold spots.

This is an effective solution, but down can still migrate within baffles and will sometimes leak through the seams, though usually in small amounts. Alternative insulations made from synthetic fibers try to solve these problems and mimic down’s natural loftiness and compressibility, but they fall well short of the mark.

Enter the Eddie Bauer EverTherm Jacket. Introduced in 2017, the EverTherm is the first jacket to use a revolutionary down fabric designed and manufactured in Italy, called Thindown^®.

Instead of using individual down clusters, Thindown^® bonds the feathers between two ultrathin layers of fabric to create a single sheet of insulation that maintains all the benefits of down without the need for baffles or quilting. No cold spots, no feathers leaking out—just ultralight, breathable warmth.

The original down jacket, the Skyliner, is the perfect example of Eddie Bauer’s passion for adventure-informed innovation. That spirit of innovation continues in the EverTherm.