Columbia Sportswear | Omni-Heat Technology | Content Marketing

Columbia Sportswear spokesman Scott Trepanier explains the apparel-maker's most recent innovation in outdoor gear technology: Omni-Heat.

Most people are familiar with "space blankets" — the Mylar-like materials used to create super-thin but super-warm emergency blankets. Columbia applied this technology to the interior of jackets, using a matrix of aluminum dots to reflect the wearer's heat back into the body.

The next step, added this season, is battery-powered heat. The glowing logo on the breast of the jacket is actually the wearer's climate control switch, allowing you to maintain your preferred temperature inside the jacket.

Speaking with us at Outdoor Retailer Winter Market 2011 in Salt Lake City, Trepanier said the key to making sure such innovations resonate with customers is that the technology must be easy to understand, and it has to be visible. "I have to be able to see it and wrap my head around it," he said.

Be sure to catch the other two video clips in this series:


You can also read the blog post on Columbia at The WELDer:
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Also, be sure to check out how much fun Columbia is having telling its own story in their "Stupid Cold" campaign:

[MikeTrieu]

Heh, they had to pull the "Stupid Cold" video due to publicity backlash. There's still a copy on YouTube, though. Personally, I wasn't so much offended by the exhibition so much as it didn't really demonstrate the value proposition of the technology at all. There are people that lock themselves in a sub-zero industrial refrigerator for an hour with the product that I find much more convincing.