Reply With QuoteGore supplies only one critical ingredient in the manufacturing of waterproof-breathable outdoor gear, but it guarantees every product that uses the Gore-Tex membrane. For that reason, it holds licensees to stringent and exacting agreements. Any company that puts the material in its wares is required to use Gore-certified factories and machinery, the latter of which is typically patented, fabricated, and leased to the factories by Gore itself. The fabric maker is also intimately involved in every step of the design and production processes, a policy that has grated on some brand managers and designers over the years. “You had to buy and use Gore-made seam tape that was exactly 24 millimeters wide,” John Cooley, who for much of the nineties served as Marmot’s VP of sales and marketing, recently recalled. “You had to have zipper flaps that were a certain width. They were highly controlling.”
In a way, working with Gore is like opening a franchise. You don’t just erect the golden arches and throw a few burgers on the grill—you go to Hamburger U, follow the manual, and work within an established infrastructure. Because Gore was founded and is still run by engineers, its testing process is famously scientific. The Maryland quality-control facility, which I also toured, is equipped with a rain room, a climate chamber, and more machines than can be counted over the course of an afternoon visit. “We’re proud of the role we play from inception to finished product,” Amon told me at the end of my seven-hour, two-state, three-facility tour. “We don’t just sell the best waterproof-breathable membrane. We sell a service so that our customers—and their customers—come back. We have to be sure that Gore-Tex lives up to its promise.”
While jumping through all of Gore’s hoops is an expensive and time-consuming process, most of the industry’s top brands told me that a first-rate product comes out the other end. “To us, it’s beneficial to work with someone who’s as dedicated to performance and quality as we are,” Carl Moriarty, the lead designer at Arc’teryx, one of the most innovative and respected brands in the business, told me. While Marmot’s Cooley admitted that working with Gore could be frustrating, he too empathized with its philosophy. “Because of Gore’s rigid control over licensees and design, the performance bar was raised,” he said. “Anyone making a Gore-Tex jacket had to make it correctly. As a result, the whole breed improved, and the consumer ultimately benefited.”
Of course, no one had to buy or use Gore-Tex. By the time Gore’s primary ePTFE patent expired, in 1997, there were dozens of lower-priced, non-ePTFE alternatives, made by companies such as Japan’s Toray and China’s Formosa Mills. Gear makers could now offer a host of jackets with their own house-brand fabrics, like North Face’s HyVent, Patagonia’s H2No, and Marmot’s MemBrain. The key was how they were marketed. As long as Gore’s licensees didn’t promote them as superior to Gore-Tex, the company was willing to tolerate their existence. The performance hierarchy had been established: Gore at the top, everyone else below.
Then, in 1999, a small company called BHA Group began peddling an ePTFE membrane, similar to Gore-Tex, called eVent. Used for years in industrial smokestack filters, the membrane, tweaked to work in garments, was purportedly more breathable than Gore’s. Companies that had grown weary of Gore’s micromanaging now had a viable ePTFE alternative. “eVent was every bit as good as Gore-Tex,” claimed a marketing specialist who works with a number of brands and requested anonymity. But getting a piece of the waterproof-breathable market wasn’t that simple. “Gore literally built the industry,” said the marketer. “It’s hard to come in after two and a half decades and compete with such a well-established and respected brand.”
Since the arrival of eVent, Gore has successfully maintained its coveted market position, but its continued dominance wasn’t what fueled the current hostility, say insiders. It was the measures the company allegedly took to remain there.
WHILE THE LEGAL battles against Gore are concerned solely with its business practices, the ongoing campaign for hearts and minds in the marketplace is all about fabric performance. In case it’s not already clear, the debate over who makes the best waterproof-breathable technology is about letting moisture out, not keeping it at bay. Barring leakage resulting from excessive wear and tear or saturation—a.k.a. wetting out—any self-respecting brand will turn back rain. The fight concerns the dark, extremely niche art of breathability.
The very term breathable is a bit of a misnomer. While there are waterproof-breathable running and biking jackets, they don’t breathe that well. (Unless it’s really wet or really cold, you’re better off wearing some sort of water-resistant soft shell for aerobic pursuits.) The most obvious sign that breathability is relative is that many jackets have mesh-backed pockets or, more commonly, pit zips to let moisture vapor escape.
Still, the amount these fabrics do breathe is what keeps high-end fabric makers obsessively tinkering and tweaking. Parsing the difference requires a quick construction lesson. Gore-Tex, like the majority of other waterproof-breathable fabrics, uses a so-called three-layer technology. On the outside is the face fabric, the material you see when admiring a garment on the rack. This is layer number one, which is also treated with a durable water-repellent (DWR) finish, a first line of defense whose molecules bond to the jacket’s fibers and therefore don’t inhibit breathability. Layer two, which you can’t see, is the ePTFE membrane with a separate, slathered-on protective coating, made of polyurethane and other ingredients, that protects the ePTFE against contaminants, such as sweat, body oil, and sunscreen residue, that can compromise breathability. And, finally, there’s usually a third inner layer, the softer lining you feel against your skin.
eVent is slightly different. You still have a DWR-treated face and an ePTFE membrane, but rather than use a separate, polyurethane-based coating to protect the membrane, eVent infuses it with polyacrylate, among other ingredients, which allegedly makes it more breathable but, according to some fabric experts, less durable than Gore-Tex.
NeoShell, not unlike the many house-brand fabrics currently found in lower-priced jackets by manufacturers big and small, ditches the ePTFE membrane altogether, instead using a polyurethane membrane. Yet, as with eVent, NeoShell’s protective ingredients are infused into the membrane, not glued over it as a separate layer, the way it typically is in Gore-Tex.
Further complicating things is the issue of convection, or what’s now known as air permeability. Not to be confused with breathability, air permeability refers to whether a fabric allows a cold breeze to come in from the outside or the hot air that builds up inside the jacket during exertion—not just the vapor from sweat—to escape, cooling you down. In theory, virtually all waterproof-breathable hard shells are windproof—meaning they’re not air permeable and that hot air thus has no way of escaping. But ask Columbia or NeoShell or eVent and they’ll tell you that those little poofs of air billowing around beneath your jacket can miraculously escape through their membranes. You need not open pit zips or unzip your jacket, they insist; the fabric does it for you. Gore disputes this claim. “Gore’s belief,” said the company’s Tim Smith, “is that something cannot be windproof and meaningfully air permeable at the same time.”
Perhaps no one has dedicated more time to testing the performance of these fabrics than Alan Dixon, the cofounder of BackpackingLight.com. Dixon has spent hundreds of hours analyzing the claims of waterproof-breathable garments; he even wrote an article, entitled “High Exertion Moisture Accumulation in Rain and Wind Shells,” research for which involved hiking the same trail, at the same time, at the same pace, for weeks. His conclusion? Even though he’s been known to have an eVent bias, he acknowledged that “it’s splitting hairs. Yes, there are some differences in the membranes themselves. But to the average person, they’re often slight. It’s a matter of degrees.”
In the lab, there are plenty of ways to measure those degrees. There are “cup tests,” “inverted cup tests,” “sweaty hot plates,” “sweaty mannequins,” and half a dozen other contraptions that each company has devised to measure the rate of “moisture vapor transfer” and “resistance to evaporative transfer” and “dynamic moisture permeation,” using formulas, numbers, and jargon fit for an MIT lecture hall. Unfortunately, there’s no global standard, and none of these tests are universally conducted or regulated by an independent party. Gore, eVent, Polartec, Columbia, you name it—they’re all essentially cherry-picking their own data and then stamping an A+ on their ads and catalogs. Furthermore, scientifically measuring performance in the field is nearly impossible. There are dozens of variables, from how many and what types of layers you’re wearing to the thickness of a garment’s face fabric to relative humidity and wind speed.
Even if you could objectively determine which membrane is more breathable, it’s only one piece of the waterproof-breathable puzzle. “The membrane is just the starting point,” said Moriarty of Arc’teryx, one of the few companies to use Gore-Tex fabric exclusively in its waterproof-breathable jackets. “These fabrics work through a synergy of many elements—membrane, face fabric, backing fabric, and durable-water-repellent finish, to name a few. Once you have these elements correct, then you can begin to work on how to build that fabric into a product.” Phillip Gibson, supervisory physical scientist at U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center in Massachusetts, echoes Moriarty’s assessment. “Garment design is as important as the material itself,” he told me. “There is no single, magical membrane. It’s how you apply it that counts.” For example, whereas BackpackingLight’s Dixon thinks eVent breathes better in a wider range of conditions, Gibson told me that, because Gore strikes a reliable balance of materials and construction, “soldiers seem to like Gore-Tex best.” Military officials won’t disclose a breakdown of the waterproof-breathable technologies they use, and Gore won’t say how much money it hauls in from supplying Uncle Sam. But, says Gore representative Amon, “we do a huge amount of business with them.”
Originally Posted by LMT66
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