We use Berry Amendment fabrics from Tweave and Polartec, all our components are also Berry Amendment compliant. Our imported fabric is from a company called Toray out of Japan and the fabric we have from them is also made in Japan. Our original LS Shirt was using Polartec fabric milled in China, as Polartec at the time did not manufacture their PFP products in the USA. A few years after we started they brought back a lot of PFP fabrics back and are now milled in their Tennessee factory. We only buy Berry Amendment fabrics from Polartec and Tweave since 2016.
You can see every aspect of what is used and sourced on our Radical Transparence page here.
https://gulchgear.com/pages/radical-transparency
For our warm weather gear we left the DWR off because it is one on the most toxic elements ever made on our planet. Check out the movie
https://massivesci.com/articles/dark-waters-pfas-focus-features-mark-ruffalo-anne-hathaway-sloan/
Most of the great DWR's that you see from imported apparel from the other big companies use the C8 carbon chain. This is the nasty stuff and banned in the United States. The C6 is still used in the States but is still bad for the environment. This will probably be banned in the coming years. We have been looking into some green DWR's that are done by a few companies here in the States that claim theirs is better than a C8 DWR. Hopefully it is true and will be using this on our cooler weather apparel.
The other reason we left it of is because we are using Toray's Dot-Air fabric and it has thousands of micro dot holes woven in. Water passed right through it. One other benefit to not have a DWR on the material is for folks who use sent eliminating sprays. These only work if you can get into the fibers of the fabric. With a DWR the sprays just bounce off or just affect the surface. They need to get into the fibers to kill the micro bacteria.
Cheers,
Brian,
Owner, Gulch LLC
