The Eiderdown

Thanks to its exceptional history and extraordinary characteristics of down, the Eider duck is worth particular attention. This large see duck is known also as the Eider Duck (Somateria mollissima): its female has brown plumage, while the adult male is white and black.
This species is distributed over the northern Europe, and in fact is frequently noticed along the Italian coasts as well. But it is principally Iceland to where belongs the plumage widely used in the duvets production.
The Eider down is not raised commercially—a method commonly employed for other types of down qualities—but on the contrary has wild origins. The Eider ducks nest on cliffs close to the sea and line the nests with soft down plucked from the mother duck’s breast in order to better preserve the eggs’ warmth. Once the eggs are open and the nestling is weaned, authorized gatherers (and only them) climb the rocks to harvest manually from the abandoned by the ducklings nests precious down flakes, which thereafter are to be cleaned and sterilized. As a result gathered quantities vary from year to year, however only a few hundreds of items filled with pure eider down reach the market.
The eider down flakes are brown, white-striped, and particularly soft, and their characteristic to strongly hook and stick together (in order to resist the icy Arctic winds) provide the eiderdown clusters with a unique insulating capacity and thus create a natural compact cover.
Exactly for this reason a duvet with eiderdown filling is the lightest, the softest, and the warmest. And therefore DaunenStep manufactures its eiderdown duvets with the finest fabric in pure silk with a special opening that permits to observe and verify this jewel of nature.