Karrimor Back Late This Summer

It's good news for fans of one of the UK's best known outdoors brands with the announcement at the recent Soltex trade show, that Karrimnor packs and clothing should be back in the shops with a vengeance from this summer onwards.

The famous Lancashire company was bought out by Lonsdale, the boxing and sports giants, after it got into financial difficulties last year. The Karrimor brand shops closed down and there's been a certain amount of confusion over the future of the brand generally.

From later this year onwards though, a revamped range of Karrimor clothing and packs is going to be distributed by budget brand Wynnster and should be widely available once again in outdoor shops.

Wynnster were displaying a selection of the new Karrimor range and it looks great. On the pack side, some of the oid faithfuls are back - the Hot Earth and Hot Ice for example - but there are also several interesting new models including the Hot Heli 35 which is aimed at ski mountaineers and two new fast-moving packs the hydr8 35 and hydr8 20 which take Karrimor's neat and very useful wrap around hip-fin ppockets and incorporate them into larger capacity day packs than before.

Karrimor to use eVENT

Karrimor's clothing range pre-bust, was looking a little tired and generic. The good news though is that the company is going to be using the excellent eVENT waterproof / breathable fabric in its range for autumn / winter '05.

That's very welcome since it's a really impressive fabric and offers a wider choice to anyone looking for an alternative to Gore-Tex. Other eVENT users at the moment include Montane, Rab, Craghoppers and Helly Hansen.

There was some neat looking clothing on display in Manchester, but we don't yet have full details of the range, more information when we have it.

Finally, the KSB boot range continues as normal, distributed by a different company, and should still be in the shops. For this spring you can expect eVENT waterproof / breathable boot liners in the range.