If there's one thing that you need in Boston, it's a jacket that keeps you warm.
Ministry of Supply, a fashion and tech company headquartered in the Leather District, has taken this concept to a whole next level by inventing an intelligent heated jacket that heats up upon vocal request and uses machine learning to learn wearer preferences over time.
It looks like the idea caught the attention (and the wallet) of many people. Launched on Kickstarter on Wednesday, the campaign to fund the production of the smart heated jacket raised over $250,000 as of Friday morning. In other words, 840 online backers allowed the company to crowdsource more than three times its initial goal - $72,000 - in 48 hours.
Started in 2012, Ministry of Supply was founded by engineers Aman Advani and Gihan Amarasiriwardena, who met at MIT and decided to make workday clothes as comfortable as weekend clothes. Today, the company has eight stores across the country and a team of 12 people in Boston, which is still the birthplace of any innovation the company is introducing. In March last year, for example, Ministry of Supply launched a 3-D robotic knitting machine in its flagship Newbury Street store.
The intelligent heated jacket, which Amarasiriwardena called "the frontier of the next five years at our company," is meant to integrate the benefits of a traditional winter coat and layered clothing. The first will keep you warm, but "it's bulky," Amarasiriwardena said. The second allows you to somehow control the temperature, but it can be unpractical.
The jacket uses battery-powered carbon fiber heating elements located in one central back heat zone and in two pockets. The max runtime at full heat is 4.5 hours, the company said.
The jacket comes also with a smart personal thermostat. "This thermostat," Amarasiriwardena explained, "would basically look at your body temperature and the outside temperature and even your motion, and use all of that to learn whether you need more or less heat." Over time, the jacket will automatically learn a user's preferences, he added.
By contributing to the Kickstarter campaign with at least $280, customers will receive their intelligent heated jacket in early November.
