A redesigned version of the U.S. military’s Bunny Boot, featuring rubber layers sandwiching wool felt insulation, is about to hit the Alaska market.
Sean McLaughlin, CEO of the Alaska Gear Company, said his firm has spent the last three years developing the updated boot. McLaughlin said there are no legal barriers to copying the Extreme Cold Vapor Barrier Boots, originally created for U.S. troops during the Korean War. “There’s literally two factories in the world that looked like they could make this boot and one of them is in China,” he said. “So we went and flew out and met the people that ran that factory, and they became part of de-facto kind of part of our R&D team for how to actually build it.”“We put out a note saying we’re building a new Bunny Boot, we need testers and we had over 10,000 people put in requests to be a tester,” McLaughlin said. “We sorted through that.