 I'm out here in Munich at the Gore-Tex lab, it's where they test all their new technologies and products. We're going to have a look inside, we're getting exclusive access to see how it works and what makes their products so great. Thank you so much for having us at the lab, Rodrigo. Could you tell us a little bit about the history of Gore? Yeah, of course, glad to. So, Gore starts in the late 50s, but it really takes off about 10 years later when Bob Gore discovers the properties of EPTFE. So when you expand the material that's at the heart of our products. And very shortly afterwards they develop Gore-Tex, which is a layer material that has really cool properties. Basically it's waterproof, it's windproof, but it has very tiny pores that allow water vapor or moisture to go through. And that means that you can be in the rain, you can go outside with our products, and you'll be protected from the rain, from the wind, but perspiration can still go out. So get that dry feeling on your skin and you'll be comfortable. So how long has this lab been here? This lab has been here some 25 years, but lab testing has been going on since the very beginning of Gore, really. So Gore, EPTFE, Gore-Tex, it's all linked together, we've always been testing labs. Okay, and what facilities do you have here? Here we've got a footwear lab, we have a rain room and we have a textile lab which also does work on R&D and gloves. And what is the lab testing so important? So we have this guarantee, right? We have to make sure that our products do what we say they do. Because it's important for us that people who actually wear our products trust us, that they know that their products are going to work for them. And for that we need to test everything that we produce to the extreme, to make sure that it's as good as it can be and that it's good for the consumers in the end. Awesome, can we start with the textile lab? Yeah, sure, of course. This is a Martindale, that's what we call it, and this is an abrasion test. So the idea here is that you have a material which is a kind of wool that is kind of rough, you can feel it yourself, it's a bit rough there. And then you get the textile sample and you put it on the other side and you just rub this along and you can see that this sample can rotate a little bit freely. That way you can make sure that you're getting all kinds of directions on that sample. So this is really what this machine is scanning or it's tracking. So this is how it can pass over pretty much all of the area. Everywhere gets some abrasion, that's the idea. Okay, and how long do you expect the textile to last on this durability? So if we're doing this dry, so if we're not wetting the wool beforehand, then this could take weeks or even months on the actual laminate, the actual fabrics that are used there. So it can take a super long time. You can think about that, if you're wearing something that's wet for a week and it continues to rub on it, it's not going to be your jacket that's going to have a hole in it, it's going to be your skin. Yeah, continuously in the same exact place, yeah, okay. So really this is way more harsh than what your skin would be under or what the materials would be under normal condition. This is how we make sure that it'll last for years. So one thing that we also have is for example the crumple tester. So in the crumple tester the idea is that we play with the material in different ways. So if we're just rubbing it, we can also rotate it, to like wring it, and we can also press together and bend it and have creases form that way. And wherever you crease then you have a smaller radius, that just means that you have a place where you have more stress on the material. And that's especially interesting not only on the flat textile but also wherever you have a seam that is being sealed, because that area is normally stiffer. And if it's stiffer it means that if you bend it then you have more stress on that really. Yeah, so like in this one here sorry you can see where the seam is, it's kind of bent over and flexing out. So in a very small location there's kind of pulling and strain on the fabric. Exactly, yeah. And so we also want to test okay under those conditions, right? If you're wearing your trousers and then you're bending in the knee or whatever. How long does it take to break because of that? Yeah, and the answer is it also takes a long, long, long time. So it can be months until we actually get to the breaking point of that seam or of that material. So months of this just running, crumpling, flexing it before either the seam fails, the stitching or the laminate separates. Exactly, that's exactly right. And I mean you can see that it runs more or less fast, like once it actually starts. And so what we're seeing here is that motion that each individual compression and stretch, and then we can see how many times the textile has gone through that. Yeah, exactly. So here you can see the counts that it's been running, right? Yeah. The speed of course. So what you'll notice is that the top cylinder is rotating, yeah? And the bottom one's not rotating, it's just going up and down, yeah? So that way you can get basically this kind of movement like going like this, yeah? Yeah. So we have one more place where you can also see durability and action. Okay. And that is in the instrument. So the instrument is a tensile test. Yeah. So we basically get our laminate, get that fabric and just pull on it, right? Yep. And we see when does it break? How much can we pull before it gives way and just disintegrates? Okay. And that's what we can see here. And so you can imagine a real life situation of that would be when you pull out the jacket, when you get it hooked on something and it pulls, we don't want it to tear under those forces and stuff. We want it also to keep even if something like that happens. And so that's what we can test here with the instrument. Yeah. And so in this case, we have it running now faster than it would normally in stuff, so you can see failure quicker. Yep. But that's what we can test here as well. Under a certain amount of force, how quickly does it open up? Or if we open it up at a certain rate, when's the point where it just, when material cannot maintain its integrity and just falls apart? Okay. So this isn't accounting for the any form of puncture or anything. It's just purely taking the fabric, the weave and the lamina and pulling against that. That's it. And yeah, finding that tear strength. From the point of view of windproof, yeah? You want to wear something where if you're in the middle of a gale, you don't feel a thing. Yep. So we can test that here with this device. And basically what it's doing here is that you have the equivalent of a vacuum cleaner. Yep. And you know how you have a vacuum cleaner? You put your hand on it and then you feel that head tucking in. Yeah, the suction, yeah. Or we do the same thing by putting a piece of fabric, one of our fabrics in between, yeah? Yeah. And then because it's not 100% airtight, if not it wouldn't be breathable either. Yeah. And some air passes through. Oh, so it doesn't, it's not going to block all air because if it blocks all air, there's no air permeability. Exactly. You're going to get sweaty. Yeah. If it's completely blocking everything then that's like if you wear a piece of plastic, you know? Yeah, okay. You'll be, in theory, dry until you start sweating like mad and then you're not dry anymore. Yeah, yeah. And so we'll put up our plastic of our fabric in here. Yep. We have that vacuum and then we measure how much air manages to pass through. Yeah. We compare that with the same fabric but without our membrane, without our special EPTFE Gore-Tex layer, yeah? Yeah. And see how much passes through then. Yeah. And what we get is that if you have our membrane, we're talking about three liters of air passing per second in one whole square meter of fabric. Yeah. Whereas if we have just the fabric without our membrane. Yeah. We have about 825 liters per square meter. Per square meter. Per second. Per second. 825 compared to three. Exactly. So that's basically some 250 times, a bit more, more air passes through the fabric itself than if we have our membrane in there. If we have our membrane, we cut that by a factor of 250 or almost 300. That's phenomenal. So what does that mean for somebody out in the hill obviously? We've said that it's going to breathe but are they going to feel any of that? They won't feel any wind at all because really from our experience, anything under the 10 liters per square meter per second of air passing through, you can't feel. Your body cannot really register it. Yeah. That's below the level where we could have a sensation. And that means that you are completely wind-proof. Yeah. So we're seeing 831 liters of air per meter squared per second passes through this fabric. Exactly. That's what's going in through here and you can actually, you would feel. So if you were on the other side of that, you would really feel a lot of air rushing through and then you wouldn't feel very wind-proof at all if you were wearing this. Okay. And there we are. So in this case right now we're measuring 2.6 liters per square meter per second. Compared to 830 liters. We also have is the suitor which tells us if the material is completely water-proof for a certain pressure. Okay. So what we do here is that we put water in, we apply a certain pressure and we check that no water goes out of the material on the other side. So we use these kinds of pieces of cloth. Now we go in here, right, and then you put a piece of paper on top and press this tight and then pressurize this with water inside and with air so that it pushes that through the material. So I'd see that with this kind of clamp. Yeah. And then I would put a piece of paper here. Yeah. And I would then see on that piece of paper if there is water coming through after all the pressure that we put on. Okay. So we can make sure that it is water-proof to the pressure that we specify. So for breathability, what we test is how much water vapor, how much moisture, can go through the membrane or can go through the material, right? Okay. And basically what you care about in the end product is the resistance essentially. But what we test here is how much mass of water can go through per unit surface area, per unit time, yeah? So in one hour with a sample that's this big, how many grams can go through water, whatever, so to say. Okay. And that gives an idea of how much perspiration can go through the fabric. Yeah. And the way to do that is by having, by creating a system where you have one enclosure with 100% humidity and you have another enclosure beside it where you have a lower humidity, right? And that way you have a difference in humidity between them. And that means that moisture wants to go from one to the other. Yeah. And in between you have our membrane. Yeah. And that way we can test, okay, with this membrane, with this textile, how much is allowed to go through after a certain amount of time. And translate to the test, that means that we get here this kind of cup. Yeah. You have here an environment, an enclosure that has a defined humidity. Yeah. It's defined by the mixture, the liquid mixture that's in this little cup. Yeah. And here you have water, so that's of course 100% humidity. It's completely humid. It can't be more humid. Yeah. And when you put these together, you have the membrane in between. And so that membrane is the only thing that's keeping, that's really keeping the moisture from in here with 100% from going to the moisture in here, which is lower. Right. Because the, so if you've got 100% say in here and you had zero in here, that's going to want to equalize. You're going to want to balance out the humidity. Yeah. But there is a barrier in the way and that barrier is our clothing. So we're trying to work out how fast it allows that equalization. Exactly. Okay. The lower the barrier, it means you can, you'll have more breathability. Yes. And so then we would put this on here and what we'll do is weigh this at the beginning. Yep. Then put it on, wait a while. This would gain weight by having moisture from this pool go into here. Then we'll weigh it after a certain time. And that's how we know how much can actually go through this material here. Yeah. That's how we can do these kind of tests. So that's testing it on a textile level. Cool. So we know it's durable. We know it's waterproof. We know it's windproof and we know it's breathable in its base fabric form. How do we go about testing it once we've made it into a garment? Well, for that you can grab this and you can go see that in the rain tower. Okay. So we're going to go and give you a little shower Simon. Yeah. Okay. And there you're going to see how the material behaves and how we can test once it's actually a finished product, right? Yeah. A finished jacket and how we can make sure there that it's still is completely windproof and completely waterproof there as well. So I'm standing outside the rain room and the storm cube. What Gore-Tex are doing here is testing that the final styles we see in store are going to keep us dry when we're out in the hill. We're really looking at the component tree and the fit of the product to make sure it stays dry. Usually we'd have mannequins in here. Today I'm going to be wearing the same light blue cotton that really shows up any water that makes it through. We've got the nozzle six meters above us and we've got the nozzle at the side. They're going to be simulating the same volume of water in one hour that we actually see for eight hours out on the hill. I know what you're really wanting to see though. Yeah, this is definitely starting to feel like I'm back home in Scotland now. This is proper rain. This is really properly getting me wet all around. I can see exactly why this is going to be a really good test. A half an hour of this is brutal. You're definitely going to find if there are any flaws in a product in here. The water is speeding up really nicely on this at the minute as well. Over time I guess we'd see if there were any gaps in that and if it was working its way through but this is working really well. I mean I've been in some bad weather but I don't think I've quite had this on Ben Nevis just yet. Well that was a pretty successful test as to whether I could stay dry in a lot of rain. Now we're going to go across to the storm cube. This is going to give me up to 80 kilometres an hour of wind so we're going to test it and try and drive this jacket off. So we're just outside the Gore-Tex footwear lab. We've bought our Ensalomon boots from the store. We're going to put them through their paces, run them on the tests that they've got here to show you how they get tested so that when they're on your feet you're going to stay dry. Hey Stefan, so I've got these boots. Can you show us the tests that you do on them so that when they're on a customer's feet they're going to stay dry? Clear, we can do the tests. First of then we test the breathability test. This is here. This room for the breathability. Outside here we have an climatic room where we build all the tests with breathability. And afterwards then we test the shoes on waterproofness in two different types. On one hand with the centrifuge and the other with the walking simulator. Okay. So can you give us a bit of an explanation as to how you test the breathability of the boots? That we have designed with the help of the Technical University in Munich and test where we can simulate and sweating food. The same what you have on your shoe that you sweat when you're moving or during the whole day and then the shoe must be breathable because if that you have no or less wet socks inside and an uncomfortable climate inside the shoe that is necessary that all the shoe have breathability. And then we see on a weight scale how much vapor transmit then from inside the shoe to outside. And with this weight difference we can calculate the breathability value of the finished shoe. So we've brought our boots over to the centrifuge and we're going to get them tested. What the test does is we fill the boots up with water, we put them inside and we spin them round. They get spun round at about 250 rpm which creates about 30g of force. What that is testing is that the core design is going to keep your feet dry. So now we've got them out the centrifuge. What this has proven is that the boots construction is keeping water out and it's going to keep your foot dry. What we now want to see with the walking simulator is that once the boot is on your foot and moving if the water will still stay out. So Stefan we're going to put the boots on the artificial feet. Yes, because on every shoe, on every artificial foot you find these black points here because these are water sensors. So at the moment we have with this flexible 12 water sensors around the foot to can see if the shoe is really waterproof. Now I will prepare the artificial foot with a paper and sock, bring the sensors in and then we bring it in the machine and we start with the tests. Sounds good. So we're now going to put the boot in the simulator. It's going to run through about 140,000 cycles. That's the equivalent of the end consumer going for a hike in a river for about 40 hours. That does vary depending on whether we're using a running shoe or a mountaineering boot. But as I say, for this boot 140,000 cycles should do it. When anything is wrong, one of the green points will be red and shows us where the leaking is located and the counter stops automatically. So the test is now complete. We're going to get Stefan to take the shoes off, have a look inside and hopefully they're still dry. Looks good to me. It looks also for me great. So absolutely waterproof. But we will also check the other one. So you see this pair? Because we have always a pair in the test. It's really waterproof. Fantastic. So that's us finished at the Gore-Tex lab. I think what we've really learned is the most important part of it is the collaborative process between the brands and Gore-Tex themselves and how they make a better product together. Now what I really want to do is go out on the hill and see what that means for us. Well, as you can see, we're back in Scotland and my gear's really being put to the test. But learning everything we did in the lab, I know I can go out confidently knowing my gear's going to keep me dry and keep the wind out and it's allowing me to go out and engage with the places we love for years to come.