What Is Muscovy? Your Guide to the Giant, Ugly Duck That's Saving Down Gear

Outdoor brands Zenbivy, ZPacks, and Feathered Friends all released muscovy down products in 2025 and Therm-a-Rest will follow this spring with the muscovy-filled Parsec and Polar Ranger sleeping bags. The industry is shifting quickly, but not just because of muscovy's impressive performance. Economics, politics, and our love affair with fashion trends have all played a role in the composition of your next puffy jacket.

A Different Kind of Down

Down is the soft undercoating of a bird and each cluster has thousands of barbed filaments that grasp onto other clusters, allowing them to fill a space with little material and weight. Size matters, and muscovy down clusters are as large or larger than goose down clusters and capable of reaching the higher fill powers that premium outdoor gear demands.

Muscovy has been used in Europe and Asia for furniture production but hasn't been used widely in the United States until now because the species is aggressive in captivity. Breeders in Europe have managed this aggression with unethical practices like beak-trimming that don't align with the ethics of many outdoor brands and their suppliers. Down supplier Softie started working with free-range muscovy sources in China two years ago and Allied Feather and Down followed suit, eliminating the barriers to this new material.

This opened the door to a much cheaper source of down for outdoor brands being squeezed by the rising cost and demand of goose down. Muscovy costs as much as 50% less than goose down, depending on the grade, and the performance specs are nearly equal.

“It really has a lot more to do with marketing over the last several hundred years. There's plenty of availability of both birds. There are 250 million muscovy globally and around 400 million geese. The geese have been heavily marketed as the superior product for centuries,” Denise Post, the program manager at Softie, explained to me.

Solving the Goose Down Shortage

As intriguing as muscovy is, progress and performance alone aren't driving the shift and, unfortunately, your next down jacket won't necessarily be cheaper even if it's filled with duck fluff. The demand for down is at an all-time high and expected to keep growing. Estimates vary, but a 2025 Global Trends Observatory report predicts it will nearly double by 2032 from a $3.5 billion global industry to $5.2 billion. Another study predicts it to hit as high as $8.7 billion in the same period.

"As it has become more stylish to wear down, it's the outsiders in that space—the more fashion forward brands—that have been really increasing the demand for down that's on the market," Therm-a-rest's product line manager, Chris Davis, said.

In recent years, traditional performance brands have capitalized on gorpcore and ski trends, stressing the limited supply chain. Arc'teryx sells 24 different down jackets and only a fraction of those are made for truly technical pursuits. Huge outsider fashion brands like SKIMS, Supreme, and Jil Sanders are edging into the outdoor apparel market—all three have done recent collabs with The North Face. It's an older story, but there's no better example of goose down’s shift towards mainstream status than that of Canada Goose, which rebranded in the 2010s from the maker of attire for Arctic scientists to one that produces the choice jacket of the 1%.

It's not just the outdoor brands, either. Luxury designers, athleisure brands, and those making daily staples want in too. Aritzia, Quince, and Moncler are some of the top goose down users in the country. Uniqlo and its parent company Fast Retailing, the third-largest clothing manufacturer and retailer in the world, are known to produce millions of units per style and counts down jackets among its best sellers. Even Louis Vuitton is attempting to capitalize on the trending term "puffer jacket” in their 25/26 ski line.

So yes, to an extent, you can blame the Kardashians and Bay Area tech bros for the price of a new down bag. Due to fluctuating supply and increased demand, goose down prices have more than doubled since 2021. According to Softie, fluctuating diets and meat prices in China have driven down the price of goose and duck, making farmers less incentivized to raise the birds and, because most down is a byproduct of the meat industry, reducing supply.

According to Softie, China itself has also been consuming more goose down given their cold northern climate, further reducing the overall supply. Meanwhile, greater interest in natural materials worldwide and a boom in travel and hospitality in developing countries—a lot of down goes into bedding, the kind you find at nice hotels—have added to the demand. Throw in tariffs where none previously existed and you have a supply chain under heavy pressure.

"When President Trump enacted reciprocal tariffs in 2025, the goose down we import from Europe went from a 0% to a 15% tariff rate. There's no domestic goose down source available in the qualities and quantities we need," Juna Gates, the founder of Feathered Friends, explained. “The tariff structure doesn't give any break for raw materials imported for use in US manufacturing, so the cost to make our products has risen significantly over the past year.”

"We absorbed the cost increase for as long as we could, but as a small business with slim margins we eventually need to pass on those extras," she said. "We raised sleeping bag prices this past fall and will be raising garment and bedding prices in early 2026."

Across industries brands have been transparent about price increases due to tariffs. Many textiles simply aren't manufactured domestically and local producers won't pop up overnight. For the down industry, muscovy has stepped into that liminal space.

How Muscovy Performs Compared to Down

High-quality down is measured by fill power, turbidity (cleanliness), and content. Fill power, a measure that indicates how much space one ounce of down occupies when fully lofted, is the primary distinguisher between duck and goose down when it comes to performance. Higher fill power numbers indicate larger clusters, better insulation, and superior compression. Traditional duck down topped out around 700-800 fill power because of the birds' smaller size, while premium goose down can reach 900-plus. Muscovy consistently achieves fill powers of 800 to 900.

"My understanding of how down works is that it tends to scale with the size of the bird. Geese tend to be larger birds, so they have larger down clusters with thicker stems, and the larger clusters is what gets you that 900 power," Therm-a-rest's Davis said. "The fluffiness is where you get the higher fill power, and then the thicker stems give you that durability."

The structural differences matter, too. Muscovy down clusters are exceptionally resilient, springing back quickly for greater loft and faster compression recovery. The down also has an inherent clinginess similar to eider down—a premium material from eider ducks that live in certain parts of the Northern hemisphere—where barbed filaments tend to grab onto each other, creating more stability within baffles and reducing shifting (though you may have to give it a good shake occasionally to remove clumps and cold spots).

Goose down may still have advantages in specific areas. According to Allied Feather + Down, the clusters have longer filaments, different barb shapes, and unique fat and oil composition that make them slightly more compressible and resilient.

Oils are an important factor for muscovy, as these birds are adapted to wetter environments than geese and have a greater amount of fat and oil in their skin and feathers. Muscovy’s denser barbs also tend to hold onto these oils more than goose down does, which creates an odor when damp that some users find off-putting. There aren’t any objective evaluations for odor, but the Institute of Down and Feather Laboratories have found in proprietary tests that the scent is unnoticeable to most people.

Fortunately, Softie stepped in with a treatment called Ultrasonic washing that balances the odor-causing oils without drying out the down, providing an extremely clean, untreated product. Zenbivy also offers muscovy down with Allied’s ExpeDRY water-resistant treatment, which doesn't go through the Ultrasonic washing process and is better suited for those who don't notice the smell.

How noticeable the odor is depends on what kind of gear we're talking about, too. Generally, your sleeping bag shouldn't get wet, and if it does, you might have bigger problems than how it smells. A muscovy down jacket, like Zpack’s Down Jacket, will likely get far more exposed to the elements and produce a more obvious odor, so it may make sense to stick to goose down for your puffy if you’re sensitive. But so far, every brand–Zpacks, Zenbivy, Feathered Friends, and Therm-a-rest– is using Softie’s Ultrasonic muscovy in their products, rendering the odor issue moot.

Muscovy doesn't have the same performance history as goose down. Properly maintained goose down can last 25 years or more, but muscovy is so new that no one has had the chance to conduct the same extended testing. Davis is confident in its performance, though: "The muscovy literature that we have is pretty strongly in favor of muscovy having at least as thick, if not thicker stems than goose, and better loft retention over the course of time."

Courtesy Zenbivy

What All This Means for Gear Buyers

Whether or not muscovy performs as well as goose down will be determined over time by backpackers, campers, skiers, and puffy jacket wearers. For now, customers can at least enjoy a break from the rising cost of everything when they go to buy their next piece of down-insulated gear. Zenbivy offers both goose and more budget muscovy options. For Therm-a-rest, the Parsec and Polar Rangers will be priced the same as previous goose-filled versions of the products but Davis notes that muscovy allows the brand to increase and maintain performance attributes without a big price hike.

Still, the shift from goose down to muscovy represents an interesting development in the outdoor industry. It's a necessity-driven materials innovation that might actually deliver real performance improvements. Muscovy isn't just a substitute for goose down; it's a legitimate alternative with distinct characteristics worth considering on their own merits.

If we're witnessing a budding revolution for the outdoor industry, time will tell how long it lasts. Luxury fashion brands face the same problem as outdoor gear companies, and some have recently expressed interest in working with Softie to source muscovy down. Meanwhile, budget lifestyle brands like Vuori and Zara have gotten into skiwear made with duck down. It takes pressure off the goose down market but could mean that the savings of muscovy will start to shrink as the material gets more popular.

If you care about the stuffing inside your puffy jackets and sleeping bags, or simply prefer a safer bet until muscovy's performance is fully proven, you might want to buy your goose down gear sooner rather than later. For everyone else, this ugly duckling might be exactly what your gear closet ordered.