Yakkay is a new company designed for total norms who want to ride a bike, but not have their fashion-conscious aesthetics compromised by riding a bike. Yakkay has designed a system of helmets and covers that allow riders to wear a helmet that doesn't make riders "look like a dweeb." In my opinion, it succeeds at making riders look like a bunch of clueless norms who like having sweaty, furry buckets on their head.
There's not much right with these helmets but there are many, many things gone awry with its design. Aesthetics aside, the idea of strapping texture-heavy fabric to the outside of a helmet is an effective way of making any bike helmet very unsafe. Helmets are designed to have shiny plastic shells in order to allow a rider's head to easily slide across rough pavement. This is very important if you take a spill at any speed. Helmets have been made without this casing, but the friction caused by high-impact foam sliding across asphalt can cause neck injuries by slowing down the riders' head much faster than the rest of the riders' body. (Skin and lycra are much smoother materials than EPS foam or human hair.) Synthetic fur and twill fabrics aren't exactly low-friction materials. This helmet essentially causes the same problem its outer shell was designed to prevent.
The helmet itself (as it appears in video on the Yakkay site) appears similar in quality to a $20 BMX helmet you can find at major department stores. If you compare a helmet like this to a $70 zip-injected Bern helmet, the difference in quality is astounding. Zip molded helmets are reputed to last years longer than standard EPS foam helmets, and even longer in helmets where foam is adhered to the plastic shell with glue. This is because the high-impact foam is bonded to the low-friction shell in as it's produced, allowing for an all-around tougher helmet. If you take a cheap foam helmet like Yakkay and subject it to regular use (and abuse) you'll find that it'll quickly become damaged to an unusable state. Each time a helmet is dropped, banged against a bike rack, or similarly subjected to seemingly small impacts, it is damaged. Tougher helmets hold up to this abuse. Cheap helmets do not.
Despite their high price tag, Yakkay helmets are cheap helmets. The $165 (!!!!) price pays for a fancy cover and dysfunctional accessory options for a helmet that should cost $35 max. I don't know why this is really upsetting me as the fashion industry is full of overpriced, ineffective products. My best guess is that there exists $165 deathtrap helmet ideal for sidewalk-riding yuppies/suburbanites on $20,000 bikes, but cycling still has not become mainstreamed to the point where it's guaranteed my friends won't die while riding in the city.
If this helmet idea catches on, we're only moments away from cheap rip-offs that are somehow more dangerous as well as furry Hot Topic goth helmets. This Yakkay helmet idea keeps getting worse and worse. Their slogan is "brainwear for smart people." The only smart people in this deal are the ones taking in the profits.
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