Manufacturer of well-grounded tents made out of air.

A prototype of a NEMO Type II bag, which will be spoon-shaped with more space around the knees to balance comfort and performance. Photo courtesy of NEMO

NEMO Equipment has made waves in the outdoor industry with its tents and camping accessories. Now, NEMO is turning its attention to sleeping bags, and the company is looking for gear testers to collaborate in developing a line of sleeping bags for 2013. (Visit the NEMO Facebook page to enter the Adventure Product Testing Team contest.) Mountain caught up with founder Cam Brensinger to find out what drew him to sleeping bags, what new things NEMO is trying, and what he’s looking for in testers.

Why sleeping bags?

We had this realization that the sleeping bag category in general has been pretty sleepy. Breaking news for sleeping bags is some new lightweight fabric, and for the customer that’s just not that exciting. And really, no one has done any real rethinking of the shape of bags, or integration with other overnight gear, or unique cool new features, or more substantial macro-level stuff that people can get psyched about.

What kind of customer are you trying to serve with your new bags?

We just had this epiphany that there are two shapes of sleeping bags in the market: mummy bags and rectangular bags. A rectangular bag gives you plenty of space, but it sometimes gives you more space than you need and it’s not very weight efficient. On the other hand, a mummy bag is really the least amount of bag you can put around you, to lie like a mummy and survive extreme cold. And we thought, that describes the two ends of the spectrum. What about all of us in the middle who do stuff where we care about the weight and we care about the thermal efficiency, but we’d really appreciate just a little bit more room to be comfortable. And that really is the message of NEMO. With every single product, we try to balance performance and comfort.

What new features will NEMO bags have?

We have the blanket fold, an extra bit of quilted material that you can tuck in around your face and it evokes the feeling of home a little bit, especially if it’s cold out. All of our sleeping bags will have a waterproof-breathable foot, because if there’s any part of the bag that tends to get wet it’s the foot end because it’s touching the inside of the tent.

The Type II bags are actually 10 degrees less warm on the bottom side, because when you lie on a sleeping bag you compress the insulation and it does very very little and you’re really relying on your sleeping pad for warmth. The hood of that Type II bag comes off and you can flip the bag over and the blanket fold comes out and you have a clean place to put your pillow and the bag is 10 degrees less warm.

The Canon series of sleeping bags is designed for extreme cold, with a built-in tunnel hood to warm air for comfortable breathing. Photo courtesy of NEMOThe Type III is a rectangular bag. We thought it would be cool to make a system around mating our Cosmo sleeping pad with a bag. And that’s been done, but this goes further. The state of my camping these days is I don’t have as much time as I’d like for adventures—and one of the barriers to getting out and having fun these days is the packing of gear. I want a grab-and-go camping system. I want a bag in my basement that has everything I need to sleep out: a pad, a sleeping bag, some kind of shelter, probably a toothbrush and toothpaste. So this bag is the first part of that system.

What’s going on with the bag that looks like it has a built-in turtleneck?

To understand this bag, you have to picture the most frigid environment you’ve ever been in. If you’re sleeping out when it’s truly minus-20 or minus-40 degrees, you’ve got to form some kind of tunnel in front of you. At that point the air is so cold, it’s uncomfortable to lie there breathing that temperature air. So we all end up, in our current sleeping bags, pulling the hood up and cinching it down to a little opening or taking an extra down jacket and making a little bit of cave around your face so you’re basically pre-heating the air. The idea here is to build that into the bag, and it’s not an uncommon idea with Arctic parkas. It makes a huge difference when it’s truly insanely cold out. And if you’re sitting there living in your sleeping bag 24 hours a day, waiting out a storm, to be able to essentially wear it like a jacket really helps out a lot.

How will the development process work?

Once we identify the testers, we’re going to set up a forum online where the whole testing community—our ambassadors and these new folks and retail partners and media partners—can come together and have an open dialogue. My design team and I always get together at this particular table in our office whenever we work on a creative project, and we want to bring those folks to our table virtually and have a fruitful conversation. —Olivia Dwyer