01
Four questions Six jackets, $215–$465 Nothing stored, nothing sent
Find your jacket, in four questions.
Outerwear is the category people get wrong most often: 28,000 mm bought for a bus stop, or 218 g taken onto a February hillside. Tell us how and where you will actually wear it and we will name the jacket and the specification that goes with it — including the cases where the honest answer is that we do not have what you asked for.
02
Four questions
The first three narrow the range: where you wear it decides the rating you need, how you run decides the weight, and what you name as most important breaks the tie between two jackets that would both do the job. The fourth is different — it rules jackets out.
Question 1 of 4
What will you mostly be doing in it?
Think about the worst two hours you will spend in it, not the average one.
Question 2 of 4
How hard do you run hot?
This is the answer that decides whether we send you to the lighter shell or the warmer one.
Question 3 of 4
What matters most?
If two of these are neck and neck, pick the one you would give the other up for. There are no wrong answers, but there are real trade-offs between them.
Question 4 of 4
Anything that rules a jacket out?
Choose any that apply, then take the recommendation. These do not rank the jackets — they remove them, and if we cannot meet one we will say so rather than write around it. Choosing nothing is a valid answer.
Your recommendation
Answer the four questions
03
How the recommendation is worked out
Four answers, sorted rather than scored. Anything you rule out in question four is a constraint: if a jacket fails one — no helmet hood, no size above XL, no published PFC-free finish — it is out, however well it matches everything else. The rules you set never get outvoted by the things you said you liked.
Constraints come first
A helmet hood, pit zips, a size above XL, a fluorocarbon-free finish. These remove jackets from the list rather than ranking them.
Then where you wear it
Hours of wind-driven rain on a hill and twenty minutes at a bus stop are 8,000 mm of hydrostatic head apart, and the jacket changes with them.
Then how you run
Running hot moves the answer to a lighter laminate and to the zips you can open. Feeling the cold moves it to fill, or to wool under a shell.
Then what matters most
Weight, waterproofing, breathability or packed size. Whichever you named settles it between two jackets that would both do the job.
What the page will not do is quote a number we have not measured. There is no hydrostatic head published for the Northbound Packable, so the results say that rather than estimate one, and where a constraint cannot be met at all the recommendation names the closest jacket and admits the gap instead of filling it with adjectives. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere: reload the page and it starts again.