Design Your Own Down Jacket

New site allows you to customise fabrics, fill, dimensions and add hood or pocket choices.

Choose from four standard models then tweak to your heart's content - there are, says PHD, 42,000 different permuations.

It's easy to use too. Our uprated Ladakh would cost £310 with better down, longer sleeves and water-resistant fabric plus a hood.

Down clothing and equipment specialist PHD has launched a new "Design-Your-Own Down Clothing" website, which allows you to order a down jacket based on one of the company's existing standard designs, but customised to suit your own preferences.

As with PHD's custom sleeping bag site, the software allows customers to start with an existing model then modify it extensively to suit. Options include specified arm length, body length and body width in sizes from XS to XXL. 

In addition you can then alter the spec further by choosing different colour and fabric combinations, plus choose to upgrade the down filling both by opting for higher loft down - 800 or 900 fill power down are options - adn/or overfilling the jacket and adding a down-filled hood in either standard head or helmet-compatible variants.

We Design Our Own Jacket...

As a virtual experiment, we opted for a £200 Ladakh down jacket as a starting point - there are four models to choose from right up to expedition level - then added options for longer sleeves and body, chose a blue DriShell outer instead of the standard fabric and upgraded to 900 fill power down from the standard 800. Finally we added a standard lightweight down-filled hood but stuck with the standard waist/hand-warmer style pockets.

The final price came out at £310 and we'd have ended up with a longer jacket with longer sleeves, water-resistant outer and a lightweight hood with top-spec 900 fill power down.

Obviously it may make more sense to go for a standard jacket if there's one available in your size and with the features you want, but if you're an odd shape or simply want to up the spec of the jacket, the PHD site gives you the power to do that using a very straightforward interface.

48,000 Permutations

There are around 48,000 possible permuations of jacket features, so you should be able to come up with something pretty much unique to you and PHD is renowned for producing top quality down kit, so you should have no worries on that side of things.

You can find the web site at phdesigns.co.uk/design-your-own-clothing.