It’s 12:21 pm on a Tuesday, and the new coat from Outlier is going live.

For the obsessed fans of this technically minded menswear house, Tuesday drops are always a big deal. This one is bigger than most. The Shelter From the Storm is Outlier’s first breathable waterproof shell. That’s the kind of thing that, if you care about it, you care about it a lot.

The jacket, in Outlier parlance, is an “experiment,” a limited-release garment that indulges every bit of the otaku flair for which Outlier has been known since Abe Burmeister and Tyler Clemens founded it in 2008.

Which means: The textile isn’t anything so prosaic as GoreTex; it’s Neoshell, two kinds of nylon sandwiching a polyurethane membrane that, as Outlier’s website puts it, isn’t “extruded like traditional garbage bag ‘waterproof breathable’ fabrics, but is instead electrospun using a nonwoven process.” It’s black, unlined, and its seams are sealed with pale-colored tape, which gives the inside a sort of Mondrian look.

The pockets close with magnets. The flap that protects the top of the zipper (and hides a secret pocket) seals with a precise little snap sewed onto a smaller flap, so you can fit a finger behind it. The cuffs close with ratchets instead of velcro. If you undo the two-way side zips, the bottoms lock together with “block tapey,” a nubbled rubber alternative to Velcro that grabs like Bristle Blocks.

High-tech fabric. Hidden pockets. Five different closures. And styling that makes the half-dozen Outlier employees modeling the jacket for Instagram look like a CIA cyberninja team from the year 2043. Or maybe a well-dressed tribe of antinationalist crytpocurrency cultists. This is Outlier, Outlying.

The company sent an email to its list telling people something big was coming this week, and earlier this morning the founders did an Instagram Live splitscreen chat with a writer from the streetwear site Highsnobiety. So at 12:21, more than 100 people are already on the website, waiting. “We’ll see what happens,” Clemens says, watching Google Analytics on a monitor. “It’s a $750 jacket, so—”

“—any time we push the price envelope, it’s hard to predict,” Burmeister says, finishing the thought. That price is comparable to other makers, but higher than Outlier's main-line offerings.

At 12:25, 134 people are on the site. Forty-two of them have clicked Purchase.

By 1:58 pm, Outlier has sold more than 80 jackets. All the extra-smalls and smalls are gone. “So that’s pretty successful,” Clemens says, relieved. “We only made like 100, but that’s a sizable run for what it is. For pants, we do thousands.”

Burmeister kicks in: “They’ll probably be done by the end of the day,” he says. “With the experiments, we want it to be short and sweet, or we take too much risk.”

Scroll through the 60 or so Outlier “experiments” and you get the impression risk is the company’s shtick. (I point you here to the Alphacharge Poncho, with its anime face mask, sandwich of fabrics including insulation used by the US military, and hidden pocket—a veritable bargain at $888 if it wasn’t sold out. (And, sure, look at that fucking poncho LOL. Fine. But I’m still kicking myself for missing out on another experiment, a broad-shouldered riff on a 1980s Armani suit.) Even if your personal style doesn’t extend past a hoodie and jeans—or, I don’t know, custom shoes and haute couture—the weirdness and make-stuff-better obsessions of Outlier in the last year have been wild to watch.

And drawing an ever-growing crowd. Pragmatic, textile-driven design, social media acumen, and supply-chain savvy made Outlier a darling of nerdy, direct-to-consumer technical menswear and an I-see-you signifier among Silicon Valley types. Today Outlier has 22 employees—Burmeister and Clemens are still the sole owners. Fashion business publications have reported its revenue as between $5 million and $15 million, “and we didn’t dispute that,” Burmeister says. Now, 10 years on, Outlier's increasingly experimental experiments are evidence that Burmeister and Clemens aren’t even close to running out of ideas.

The limited-run Shelter-from-the-Storm sold out in days... Chris Maggio for WIRED ...possibly because the cuffs close with nifty ratchets. Chris Maggio for WIRED

In the mid 2000s, Manhattan-born Burmeister was a graphic designer working on data viz for a small investment firm; he’d also realized that he could do almost all of his work on a laptop or even a cell phone and was experimenting with living out of a carry-on. “That required thinking really seriously about everything I owned,” he says. And he started riding a bike everywhere. “That’s what started destroying my clothes.”