Ever wonder what goes into developing the high-performance fabric in your technical clothing? I talked with Karen Beattie, Product Marketing Manager at Polartec, to find out. Polartec (formerly Malden Mills) is a world leader in advanced performance textiles, manufacturing more than 300 different types of fabrics, mostly for the outdoor industry (though they also develop fabrics for military and industrial use). They design fabrics for conditions ranging from extreme heat to severe cold, from dry to stormy, and everything in between. Here's a glimpse into how it’s done:

Spadout: Polartec is credited with helping develop the modern fleece. How did that happen?
Beattie: Polartec, or Malden Mills as it was called then, was a mill that largely made fake animal fur products, with the core competency of surface finishing (raising pile and creating loft). A fledgling outdoor company – Patagonia – came and showed us a problem they had. It was a carpet-like polyester pile, with one side of fuzz and one side of carpet backing – it was a little more pliable than carpet, but the same sort of thing. They were like, “This stuff has some advantages over wool; it’s synthetic, breathable, and it dries quickly, but it’s pilly, it starts looking bad, and it’d be better if it were softer on the inside because it’s like – well, like carpet backing.” So we studied the concept, and had some constructions that lent themselves to double-sided surface finishings. We tried some out, submitted them to Patagonia, and they liked it a lot. That’s how fleece was born.

Spadout: What goes into developing a new product?
Beattie: We start with a defined problem, a customer need, and we have a body of knowledge on fiber choice and polymer chemistry – what’s great about polyester, what’s great about nylon, what’s great about polypropylene. Also, we have knowledge about yarn choice, yarn size, knitting experience, what kinds of constructions to use with these yarns to maximize their potential; and surface finishing, which is our core competency – how to create loft, minimize weight, and make something that performs and is durable for the long run.

For example, if the problem is defined as internal moisture management – keeping sweat away from your body and needing quick drying – there’s the thinking that went into Polartec Power Dry with polypropylene, where we’ve got bi-component construction with the polypropylene next to the skin and the polyester on the outside. So, a fiber choice was made (two different fibers actually); a construction choice (how to knit it, where to put the polypropylene and where to put the polyester); and then some finishing ideas (brushing the inside of the polypropylene to give a couple of little touch-points next-to-skin for active moisture transport).

You take all those little variables and you consider them like levers, which buttons do I push, which levers do I pull, and you put the package together.

Spadout: And what's the step after that?
Beattie: We do both lab testing and field testing. There are a number of established lab tests – you can look at wicking performance, moisture spread, dry time; you can calculate insulation value and air permeability (how windproof or open and permeable the fabric is). You can get an idea of the fabric’s profile in the lab, and then the goal is to create benchmarks between the lab data and what it means in the real world – like if you score X in the lab, that means it’ll do Y outside. To do that we send the fabrics out to our field testers. It’s really important to build those correlations to the field, because you can make numbers [from lab tests alone] do whatever you want them to do, depending on what argument you’re trying to make.

Spadout: Is there anything new coming out, at least that you can tell us about?
Beattie: We are introducing a new softshell that we consider to be the ultimate softshell jacket. It's called Polartec Power Shield Pro and it allows true air permeability (2 cfm or 8 l/m2/sec), for a controlled two-way air exchange that improves moisture transport. We developed it to extend the range of softshells – they were always more comfortable than hardshells at managing internal moisture, but sometimes you still had to carry a hardshell for weather insurance. This has the range to let you only bring one jacket.

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