The perfect gift for your favorite climate nerd: this heat pump fashion statement

Heat pumps are having a moment. They’ve outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for the past two years. And they’ve inspired some fans who love them so much that they’re now buying heat pump merch—including socks.Quilt, a heat pump startup launched by an ex-Googler who wanted to make the appliance better-looking and easier to install, just rolled out the first-ever heat pump capsule collection, including a $55 sweatshirt, a $35 hat, and an ’80s-style holographic sticker for $2. (The designs take inspiration from old HVAC ads, but are a lot more fun.)[Photo: Quilt]When the company’s marketing and communications directors started at the company about a year ago, they both thought that building awareness and passion about heat pumps would be a challenge. “I was like, ‘How are we going to build this movement around an appliance?’” says head of marketing Lizz Niemeyer. “As we started digging in, we realized that there was this really, really passionate subcommunity of people who have just been here promoting heat pumps, talking about heat pumps, recommending heat pumps, and have been doing so for years. And that community really was looking for, I think, ways to express themselves.”Early on, when the company opened up a wait list for its first product, the team sent out a survey and promised a heat pump hat to the first 500 people to respond. They ran out of hats nearly immediately.[Photo: Quilt]The group of heat pump fans is diverse, Niemeyer says, ranging from HVAC installers who want to help homeowners make the switch to architects who want to build greener buildings to homeowners who want to do something to fight climate change.It’s hard to imagine other appliances inspiring quite the same fandom. “If I was to play armchair psychiatrist, I think there’s something here about how the climate crisis is obviously incredibly stressful and confusing and complicated,” Niemeyer says. “And a lot of solutions in this space are also quite complicated, are potentially unproven yet, have externalities, or compromises or trade-offs that have to be made . . . This feels like a real solid choice that I can make that is good for the environment and not a compromise in any way. And I think that’s one of the reasons it makes it so easy to root for.”[Photo: Quilt]Switching to heat pumps, which efficiently move heat to make a home warmer or cooler, is one of a handful of actions homeowners can take that make a serious difference in emissions, unlike, say, worrying about how many reusable bags you own. In Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, engineer and MacArthur genius Saul Griffith calculates that replacing your furnace with a heat pump is one of the critical “personal infrastructure” choices homeowners need to make.[Photo: Quilt]Rewiring America, the nonprofit Griffith cofounded in 2020 to help electrify the U.S. economy, used a character called Mr. Heat Pump Man to help spread the word about heat pumps in D.C. The nonprofit also helped successfully push to get incentives for heat pumps and other home electrification included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, as states from Wisconsin to Maine begin to roll out those incentives, even more people will be moving to heat pumps—and many of them will be advertising that fact on their clothes. The store, which just launched, is getting heavy traffic, Niemeyer says. “The socks have been a favorite,” she says. “The crew neck is a very close second.” More merch is likely to follow, she says.