If there’s one thing outdoor folks have in common, it’s the love of a good puffy. They pack down small, keep you warm, and make the cold months all that more enjoyable.
Cortazu, a direct-to-consumer outdoor brand based out of Amsterdam, has created a synthetic puffy that competes feature-to-feature with the best jackets in the industry. It’s called the Mountain Mid Layer, it uses 100% recycled fibers and insulation, and it works equally well for the front- and backcountry.
The Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer synthetic jacket on a blustery California evening.
The Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer comes in a large range of sizes and colors, the brand offers excellent fit guides, and the jacket simply works. It’ll keep you warm, layers easily, and resists wind well too.
See the Men’s Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer
See the Women’s Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer
Unique Features of the Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer
Cortazu’s model is unique in the outdoor world — it sells its gear directly to consumers, bypassing the retail markup, to keep costs low and products streamlined. The Mountain Mid Layer uses materials that are world-class, yet remains surprisingly affordable.
The shell fabric is a 100% recycled version of Toray’s Airstatic, one of the softest, most durable nylon and polyester fabrics on the market. We tested the dark blue version and it feels almost like a sleeping bag in its comfort.
The Mountain Mid Layer Airstatic shell fabric by Toray is 100% recycled and soft to the touch.
Cortazu then uses Featherless 3M’s FL700 insulation, which is a 100% recycled synthetic insulation that was created to mimic the loft and warmth properties of down. Down has always performed better when it comes to the weight to warmth ratio than synthetic, but the line is starting to blur. The Mountain Mid Layer is stuffed with the Featherless insulation, giving it an impressive level of warmth for a 20 oz. jacket.
Despite being synthetic, the Mountain Mid Layer is warm like down, and provides a similar puff.
The Mountain Mid Layer is also rife with pockets — and should not be mistaken for a minimalist puffy. There are two large, comfortable, insulated hand pockets, an external chest zipper perfect for your smartphone (or a mask), and two internal zippered pockets, which are a nice addition.
Oftentimes extra pockets get cut, and we think the two internal zippered pockets make the Mountain Mid Layer excel for use in the campsite and around a city, where it will keep you warm and hold what you need, like headphones, a wallet, buff, and more. One of the internal zippers doubles as a stuff sack as well.
Pockets galore on the Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer, including a pocket to pack up the jacket.
The final touch: a fleece-lined collar. The jacket is cozy enough without this, but the fleece is soft and warm against the neck, making it a joy to wear. The cut is European, so it’s slightly longer than U.S. styles and more form fitting.
The fleece-lined collar and external pocket built for a smartphone are key touches for a premium puffy.
Re-Greening the Planet
All of Cortazu’s clothes are made with mostly recycled materials, which is great, but the brand goes one step further. They are on a mission to re-green five million square meters (that’s roughly 54 million square feet) of land by 2025 through product sales. That’s twice the size of Europe in case you’re wondering.
For every jacket sold (including this one) Cortazu re-greens 62 square meters at the foot of Kilimanjaro, the location of their project with Justdiggit. The brand uses sales from its products to invest in water bunds in Kuku, Kenya, helping to restore dry land and the local communities that live there.
See the Men’s Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer
See the Women’s Cortazu Mountain Mid Layer
Who is Cortazu?
Cortazu is an Amsterdam based outdoor gear manufacturer that creates exceptional apparel to help re-green the planet. They use premium recycled materials for a full line of jackets and pants and for each product sold they re-green land in Kenya.
See the Mountain Mid Layer synthetic jacket, and learn more about Cortazu.
This article is sponsored by Cortazu.
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[…] Hard Shell nearly impenetrable. There are large pit zips for venting, a zip-in system to connect Cortazu’s Mountain Mid Layer or Fleece, and fully taped […]