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Jo Bradshaw reviews our Aspira 360° Smock
Jo Bradshaw is an Adventurer, Expedition Leader, Public Speaker and Páramo friend who is currently just one mountain away from climbing the highest peak on each of our seven continents! We recently asked Jo to test and review our cutting edge Aspira 360° Smock, and we’re delighted to share her feedback with you. Over to Jo…
When I was asked to give Páramo’s newest top of the range unisex Aspira 360° smock a test, with its innovative Pump Liner®, I jumped at the chance. I am a long time Páramo fan and rely on their effective and comfortable kit at work or play, from sea level to the high mountain ranges, all around the planet. It has never let me down.
This garment piqued my interest even more due to the 360° closed-loop element. I am all about reducing, recycling and upcycling so when I read that the innovative Pump Liner is made from Páramo garments which have been sent back for recycling and material waste from the textiles industry, I knew it would be a winner.
Using new environmentally friendly methods, the recycled garments are treated and made into Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) chips which retain the integrity and performance of the virgin polyester, ensuring the new material maintains the high standards which we all know and love from Páramo.
Packed full of useful features which has recently aided my journey on expeditions and days out. I could keep everything I needed to hand and still safely stashed away. The hood is big enough for a helmet, and big hair, and it also neatly rolls away when you don’t need rain or wind protection for your head, ensuring your neck is still looked after.
Sweat is a mountaineer and trekker’s enemy, particularly in the cold, and the new Pump Liner pulls sweat away from your body and pushes it through the outer material, ensuring you don’t become cold from damp skin. Couple the Pump Liner with well thought out venting options where you need it most, in the sides and upper arm, you have plenty of choices for keeping air flowing around your body when you are working hard but still want to keep warm.
Having already founded Nikwax® in 1977, Páramo’s founder Nick Brown went to the Colombian Andes in 1986 to extensively test of his prototype garments. Within this vast mountain range lies the páramo, the area between the upper limit of the forest and the lower limit of the snowline at around 3,800m. An area in which getting wet is inevitable, a great spot to test waterproof gear!
Whilst in Colombia, he was introduced to Sister Esther Castaño Mejia, a nun who was running a small sewing workshop, Creaciones Miquelina. Providing training and experience for vulnerable women, it enabled them to apply for work in other factories. The partnership blossomed and in 1992 Páramo was officially born.
Over more than 30 years Páramo and Miquelina have provided employment and training for over 10,000 women. In 2017, Miquelina attained Fair Trade status from the World Fair Trade Organization and all Páramo garments carry this highly respected label.
Páramo has a long history of sustainability, from its beginnings in the early 1990s to the current day where the team continuously push the boundaries in design and innovation. In 1999, a workshop was set up at their HQ in East Sussex, enabling the repair and alteration of Páramo garments.
Their carbon balancing initiative, working alongside the World Land Trust, was set up in 2007 and in 2012 Páramo launched their recycling scheme, ensuring that any end-of -usable-life garments are sent back to Páramo for ethical disposal, or, as with the Aspira 360° smock, are recycled and incorporated into new garments.
Fast forward to 2022 and 2 major business events took place. Páramo became employee-owned and celebrated its 30th birthday, and the management of Creaciones Miquelina was integrated into the Páramo business, securing the Foundation’s future and the production partnership for years to come.
Circling back to the Aspira 360° and you can feel the years of development which has gone into this smock. As an outdoor professional spending days, weeks and sometimes months in the same gear, I need kit that I can rely on in a variety of environments. Páramo have carefully listened to feedback in the past about features and colours, and it certainly shows.
Voted the 2025 Outdoor Brand of the Year in The Great Outdoors Magazine Readers Awards, Páramo will always be a winner for me too.
And where will you see me wearing the all-round amazing Aspira 360° smock? I am off to Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea on 18th March for my 7th of the 7 summits, a cold and wet mountain where this piece of kit will be in its element. Following that, I am off to Nepal in April to climb a 5,550m mountain called Yala Peak where we will be working hard at altitude so warmth and venting work hand in hand. Beyond that, the world is our oyster!