The four campaigns

A note on precision: figures are as published on the Kickstarter project pages. Third-party trackers such as Kicktraq show slightly different numbers because they snapshot campaigns mid-flight rather than at close. Where they disagree, Kickstarter's own page is the source we use.

Backers are not units. A backer count is a count of people who pledged, not garments shipped. Some pledges covered two garments, some covered accessories only, and a few were refunded. We do not convert these numbers into a sales figure and we would be suspicious of any brand that did.

2015: the campaign that did not fund

The first VEAR campaign was rain trousers for bike commuters, pitched with twelve design features. It raised $18,040 from 192 backers against a $25,000 goal and closed at 72%. It did not fund.

We mention this for two reasons. The first is that it is true and pretending otherwise would be silly. The second is that the problem it set out to solve, getting to work on a bike in the rain without arriving in wet clothes or spending five minutes changing at both ends, is the problem the rest of the product line kept circling back to. The 2015 campaign got the diagnosis right and the execution wrong.

What came out of the feedback was a different idea: instead of rain trousers you step into, a garment that opens along its full length and closes around your legs like a jacket closes around your torso. That became the Legs Jacket, and the mechanism survives in the VEAR Pants today. We have written about how that plays out in practice in cycling to work in the rain.

Where our backers are

Kickstarter reports where backers pledged from. The lists below are the top ten from each of the two jacket campaigns. They are not complete distributions: the countries listed account for roughly 72% of Travel Jacket backers and 68% of Winter Jacket backers, so they cannot be added up into a total number of countries.

The Most Practical Travel Jacket, 1,705 backers

The Most Practical Winter Jacket, 414 backers

What the geography told us

The single most surprising line in that data is the first one. Singapore is the number one city in both campaigns, ahead of London, ahead of every American city, from a country of under six million people. Nothing in our marketing targeted it.

Our reading, and we offer it as interpretation rather than fact: the people who bought a jacket like this are not mountaineers. They are in warm, wet, humid cities where rain arrives suddenly and heavily, and in cool, wet, maritime cities where it drizzles for months. Singapore, London, Melbourne, Seattle, Toronto, Montreal, Amsterdam, Portland, Paris, Munich. Cities where you walk and cycle a lot, and where being caught out matters more than being ready for a summit.

Amsterdam, Portland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Denmark, where the Legs Jacket campaign was run from, form a second visible cluster. Those are cycling cities, which is the audience the failed 2015 campaign was aimed at in the first place.

Warm and wet, or cool and wet, and you are on foot or on a bike. That is who this turned out to be for, and it is not who we assumed when we started.

This is why our destination writing starts with places like Singapore and the UK rather than with expedition destinations, and why we treat commuting as a category in its own right.

Quick glossary

• Backer: someone who pledged money to a Kickstarter campaign. Not the same as a customer or a unit sold.
• Funded percentage: total pledged divided by the campaign goal. A high percentage means the goal was modest, not that the product is good.
• Average pledge: total pledged divided by backers. Ours ranged from $94 in 2015 to $247 on the Winter Jacket.
• InDemand: Indiegogo's post-campaign store. Our Travel Jacket ran one after Kickstarter closed.

Keep reading

• Our lab test results: the SGS reports behind the performance claims.
• Cycling to work in the rain: where the 2015 campaign led.
• The practical travel wardrobe: our main guide.
• What to pack for Singapore: our most over-represented city.