The new official TOJ thread, 2011 - Page 985

Good 'fashion' down pieces (i.e. not a cheap tubular North Face or Uniqlo with a bunch of down shot into the hollows, the kind of cheap down jackets that constantly leak little feathers) are quite labor intensive from a sewing standpoint, at least a couple steps I'd have not thought of, I guess.
To put down in from what I saw (and how I'd want it to be done) - you have make a bunch of muslin bags, or a light fabric with a tight enough weave to trap the down inside, and you fill those independently with down on the 'stuffer' machine (looks like a huge industrial thing with a nozzle) that you just put the bags on like balloons and mete out the fill weight. The down bags are shaped specifically to the pattern and design, so they look like kidney beans or 'L's or what have you, those are random and individual.
So once these random down bags of all shapes and sizes are filled and sealed at the end, you take them and sew them into the shell, maybe flattening out the bags evenly and then quilting over them at the same time, so that the fill gets distributed to each channel and stays put and lofty. Then you sew in the lining like any other. It's like any jacket we make already, but has those fill pads sewn inside. It'd take a few more steps of design planning and workflow plans (I normally don't need to dabble too hard in workflow ideas, considering our scale) to make a successful down piece the way I'd want it.
I think I could circumvent the need for a fill machine if I handmade the fill bags, meted out the fill on my digital scale, then sent the finished fill bags to a workshop of my choice to be sewn to the panels. I'd have to find a supplier willing to sell me down in big 100L trash bags at only a few bags at a time, because I have a small work room that would get out of hand and piss off Mrs TOJ if there were any more than that at one time. So, I guess the outlook for down is better, but again, would take some real thought to engineer, possibly a lot of trials and stuff. I just don't like doing things the easy way if I find out about the next level.