Helly Hansen’s Powder Suit has the future sewn into a pocket.
Let’s be honest, we use our phones all the time. We text friends, check social media, and take photos of adventures.
So when Helly Hansen asked the Canadian Ski Team how to make apparel better, nomophobia, the fear of being more than 5-feet from one’s cell phone, just might have come into play.
The team is just a sliver of the 55,000 (yes, that’s correct) professionals who make their living in HH gear. Surprisingly, the Canadian skiing speedsters didn’t ask for improved race performance. Rather it requested a cell phone chest pocket.
So Helly Hansen set out to create the most technologically advanced super pocket the world has ever seen.
Primaloft Aerogel Pocket
Helly Hansen chose Primaloft Gold Aerogel to insulate the pocket. The low density, flexible, and extremely lightweight, gel-solid is the world’s best insulator. NASA originally developed it to help electronics withstand the extreme temperatures of space.
Helly designed the skiing-specific Lifepocket to preserve cell phone battery life. With aerogel on the outside to protect from cold and a laminate on the inside to protect from the skier’s sweat, the pocket essentially is a mobile phone convection oven.It draws and stores heat from the skier and protects the liquid in the cell phone’s battery from freezing, even working up to negative 28-degrees with or without a phone case.
It draws and stores heat from the skier and protects the liquid in the cell phone’s battery from freezing, even working up to negative 28-degrees with or without a phone case.
Helly Hansen Lifepocket/Powder Suit Testing
On a recent K2 Skis and Helly Hansen outwear testing trip at Sun Valley, I was fortunate enough to give the Lifepocket a run for its money in HH’s brand new neon orange onesie, the Ullr Powder Suit. We experienced every type of weather, from clear sunny skies to howling, freezing wind.
Can anyone don a highlighter-colored jumpsuit and not want photos? No way, bro. My phone needed power all day.
The Lifepocket lives up to its claim. My cell, a three-year-old iPhone 6 that loves to die in cold weather held a charge. It even powered my Outdoor Tech Buckshot speaker all day (‘cause wigglin’ in a onesie is made better with 80s music), and didn’t need a lunchtime plug-in to my Goal Zero Flip, which it almost always does. While testing a different, Lifepocket-less HH outerwear kit the following days, my cell got cold and required an additional charge during the ski day.
Moving forward, 60-percent of all Helly ski outerwear will have the Lifepocket. And HH is looking into integrating it into other categories, such as workwear and urban apparel. Whether or not they will be incorporating neon, day glow colors and other onesie inspired designs into those categories as well remains to be seen. We can only hope.
