I ordered one (placed Dec 9th) & it arrived last night (5-day turnaround). MSRP $400 for the men's large jacket, 30% off sale, bringing it down to $288 shipped. I'm not a fancy-clothing person & to my knowledge, this is the most money I've ever spent on a piece of clothing, so even at the discounted price, it still seemed pretty dang expensive to me. However, after being outside this morning in 20F weather,
1000% worth it. Their liquid-nitrogen video is what sold me on it:
-321F outside, 89F inside. Not bad! So for some background, about 6 years ago I bought a Milwaukee heated jacket: (scroll down for review, although I'm sure the tech has improved since then)
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/milwaukee-m12-heated-jacket-119-ship-m-l-xl-xxl.2127506/
At the time, the whole set (jacket, battery, charger) was $170. It worked really well (until my wife stole it, d'oh!). The aerogel jacket was appealing not only because of the cool tech & thinness, but also because it was self-sufficient & I didn't have to rely on a battery to stay warm. Apparently the first aerogel jackets were used on Everest & the users complained about overheating, so when they launched their Kickstarter campaign for the first-gen Lukla jacket, they added zippered vents to let you adjust your body temperature. Review here:
http://gizmodo.com/lukla-endeavor-hands-on-an-aerogel-jacket-that-doesnt-1695986865
The second-gen is the Orion series, which is what I picked up. That was also initially on a Kickstarter, but is now sold normally through their website:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/orosapparel/oros-orion-series-nasa-inspired-performance-appare
They use Solarcore aerogel, which is kind of a second-gen version with more features. So as far as a quick review goes, it's basically like a thick windbreaker. Weight is 2.5 pounds, decently hefty but not overly heavy. Reasonably thin, not bulky at all - I don't feel like the Stay Puft marshmallow man in this, which is really nice. I was able to hop in my car & put on my seatbelt without struggling to get it over the jacket. As far as the structure goes, the inside has something similar to omni-heat from Columbia Sportswear (reflective material). Then there's a layer of cloth & then the outside windbreaker-esqe material. Lots of zippered vents to let you cool down if you get too hot, which is probably more useful if you're hiking & working up a sweat. My biggest complaint is that the primary zipper is really really hard to get going when you want to close the jacket (as far as attaching it and then pulling it up). The website says they are "heat-sealed waterproof zippers", whatever that means, all I know is that it takes me like 30 seconds to fumble with getting it connected lol.
It's not stylish, but it's not ugly either. Just a nice basic winter jacket. As far as the heat goes, the best way I can describe it is that it felt like my torso was at home...not cold, not hot, just right. It's like the jacket has R50 insulation & simply keeps the temperature your body was at before you walked outside. The wind went through my work pants & cheapo gloves pretty quickly, so the jacket was definitely the most insulated part of my snow gear by far. Oh and one cool feature is that there's a piece of cloth for your thumb to go in (optionally), which keeps the top of your hands warm & also gives you an overlap area for your gloves to cover, which is really nice.
They also sell gloves, a beanie, and snow pants. I don't like changing out of snow pants into regular pants to go to work or wherever, so I skipped those. The gloves sounded nice, but didn't have very good reviews (someone stiff & still got cold fingers seemed to be the general consensus). I have Trump-style hair, so a beanie is out for me unless I want to end up looking like Encino man (I use 180's, those thin earmuffs instead, they are awesome! plus the jacket came with a hood). I've looked into heated gloves, but they are mostly really expensive, have bad reviews, and are pretty thick (you'd think that half the point of making heated gloves would be to make them thin so you could work with your fingers for stuff like outdoor camera work where you need to hit tiny buttons).
The quality seems pretty good. I saw a few threads hanging out of the stitching here & there, which made it look a little bit cheap, but it seems like it could easily last a good five or ten years if you treated it well based on how the other parts of the jacket feel. Being in my early 30's, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get any bigger or smaller (unless I really let myself go lol), so if I remember, I'll report back in a few years on how it's holding up, haha.
TL;DR: Aerogel is cool. Really expensive, but absolutely worth it if you hate being cold & don't want a crazy-thick jacket.