Down jackets
I've been looking at replacements for my now not very lofty down jacket, but have been unable to find anything decent. Chloe's excellent Moonstone jacket is still in great shape, eight years later, and is my benchmark for excellence. It had fleece lined pockets and a comfy, insulated hood back when those features were pretty rare. Unfortunately, Moonstone appears to have gone out of business, so I've been looking at Mountain Hardwear and Patagucci. I thought that "fill power" was the only important number in assessing the quality of the the insulation, until I came upon the web site of Valandre. Valandre is a French company that makes some of the lightest and highest performance sleeping bags in the world (with an appropriately elevated price). I've probably mentioned them once or twice before. In any case, they make jackets too, and when I was browsing their web site, I came upon a page that they had created, which was devoted to information about their down:
http://www.valandre.com/graygoose.php
translation
Things I did not know that affect the quality of the down:
the age of the animal,
the quality of food,
how the goose was raised,
the BREED of the goose!