Devold

Picture the scene: you're hunkered down by the wood stove in a Norwegian Trekking Association hut, playing card games with your fellow ski tourers. It might be blowing a snowstorm outside, but in here everyone's down to their base layers – and those base layers all seem to be the same brand: Devold.

For more than 170 years, fishermen, farmers, hunters and adventurers have relied on Devold’s woollens to get them through the harsh arctic winters. Founded in Ålesund in 1853, they’re as Norwegian as brown cheese and klippfisk, and their range is centred around expedition-grade base layers and heritage-style knitted sweaters.

While the heavier jumpers are knitted in robust Norwegian wool, their famous base layers use ultra-fine merino wool from New Zealand. Since 2018, Devold have bought this wool directly from Kiwi farmers through their 'Sheep to Shop' model – bypassing the usual auction system and giving them full traceability and much tighter control over quality and animal welfare. And this stuff REALLY matters to them. Their thicker wool garments carry the Nordic Swan Ecolabel – the most rigorous environmental certification in the Nordics – with EU Ecolabel certification for the merino range underway.

They’ve outfitted countless polar expeditions over the years – and as the great playboy explorer, Lincoln Ellsworth, once wrote to Devold after taking their woollens on his pioneering Trans-Antarctic plane flight, ‘We have found them to be of the very best quality’.