Marmot Bantamweight Sleeping Bag

Bantamweight Collection

With the launch of the award winning Marmot Bantamweight Jacket in 2018, we wanted to create a sleeping bag that would perform along side the jacket in speed mountain ascents at peaks around 14,000ft elevation. It would have be ultralight, compressible, and minimal in design to give the mountain athlete just what they need, and nothing more to slow them down. Marmot is the top in class brand for sleeping bags, and has the manufacturing partners to help create the lightest, top performing sleeping bags in the market.

Design Parameters

The tangible needs for the sleeping bags, based on comments from athletes, costing requirements from the category manager, and the resources available by our factory and suppliers, are the following:

1. It needs to weight less than 2lbs and compress down to the size of a standard Nalgene bottle to justify someone putting it into their mountain pack for a speed ascent.

2. It needs to be able to achieve 15°F limit temperature testing to be warm enough for someone who would get caught out in a bad storm needs to emergency bivy.

3. The insulation need to be a high fill power goose down, use an ultralight exterior ripstop with down-proof coating, and consider alternative constructions to be able to achieve requirements 1 and 2.

4. To make this product viable in the market, we will need to be efficient in in the shell construction of the bag to save cost for the high end materials, and filling process in the US.

Filled and Finished in California

At Marmot, to help preserve the quality of down, all sleeping bags above 800FP Goose Down are filled at the down filling facility at the headquarters in Rohnert Park, California. The filling expert at Marmot, and has been for +20 years is Ceferino. After we finalize the final down weight and placement, Ceferino, and Scott Zelif programs the machine to fill the baffles with the exact gram weight of down in a specific order so that the sleeping bag can be manufactured accurately and quickly. Sometimes this takes adjustments to the baffle widths, and the order of how it is filled to get a good dispersion and loft in the down.

Design / Development: Wesley Bauer

Materials Specialist: Kelvin Meeks

Category Manager: Emilee Campbell

Design Director: Ruth Beatty