Overview

Salomon was riding a string of ridiculously successful product introductions when the brand introduced its first ski in 1989. The monocoque shell was the big story, creating such a groundswell of demand that all the ski brands that came before had to re-tool to some kind of cap ski design or risk a swift, painful death.

Salomon followed up the ski launch a few years later with an idea that continues to reap rich rewards for all brands to this day. Salomon declared that experts didn’t possess a single, monolithic skill set, but that they could be divided into 3 fields, Equipe, Force and EXP, each with its own rationale for an expert-level – and most importantly, expert-price – product.   This was the moment when the market began to invert its product pyramid, to go from a base of a gazillion, low-cost package skis to a foundation built from expert skis in a minimum of 7 iterations from every supplier.

To put things in perspective, Salomon’s initiation of multiple expert ski genres has been as beneficial to the entire ski market over time as the career of Tiger Woods has been to the golf world.

Eventually, Salomon’s magic touch wore off. It looked down its Gallic nose at the arriviste shaped skis, raising eyebrows by being behind the trend for once. Its transition away from rear-entry boots wasn’t smooth, although it’s safe to say that rocky era is well behind it. Although the brand would have star products again – X Scream and Pocket Rocket come to mind – it didn’t always display its formerly flawless feel for the market. Important launches such as the BBR failed to get off the ground.

This led to a period of retrenchment during which Salomon relied on the lower cost of monocoque manufacturing to pursue a price-advantage strategy. Consumers responded well to the easy-skiing style of the Q series, but opinion leaders shied away from skis they perceived as too soft.

This takes us up to three seasons ago, when Salomon unveiled the QST series of off-trail-oriented skis. With a weave of carbon and flax (C/FX), Salomon finally found a formula for a lightweight ski that didn’t flop around on hard snow like a carp on a hot dock. With the QST series, the brand bid adieu to monocoque, building these models instead with square sidewalls from tip to tail. The top 3 QST’s, the 118, 106 and 99, also insert a segment of Titanal underfoot so the edge won’t wash out in ratty terrain.

For 2019, Salomon doubled down on C/FX, adding transverse strands to create a carbon and flax grid that makes the many models that rely on it more powerful and responsive. C/FX³ was the defining ingredient across the top of four product families: QST, QST Women’s, XDR and the Aira collection for women. The QST 106 and QST 99 also received a layer of basalt between the base and core to better withstand the battering of harbor chop.

It’s unusual to overhaul a product family’s design two years in a row, yet Salomon did so last season with QST. It jiggered the deployment of carbon, flax and basalt as introduced in 18/19, separating out the flax into its own layer and braiding the carbon and basalt into crosshatched strands. Koroyd, a synthetic honeycomb integral to QST design since its inception, was replaced in the tip and tail with bits of cork that Salomon assessed to be 16 times more shock absorbent than Koroyd.

And the changes don’t stop there. Salomon also altered the shape and sidecut radius of every QST, reducing the width at tip and tail. The prior generation’s deep sidecuts had a tendency to over-steer and didn’t slice as evenly through broken snow as the new editions. The net effect is the current QST’s are more directionally stable, quieter on edge and give the pilot more control over trajectory.

The 2021 Salomon Season

No matter how well Salomon makes its lightweight QST collection, it can’t make them into something they’re not. (This premium profundity comes at no extra charge.) To put a different spin on the same point: if you set out to make a lighter ski that doesn’t feel like a traditional, wood-and-metal make-up, one measure of your success is that you’ll alienate skiers who prefer the Old School feel.

Now that Salomon has the lightweight card covered, it’s turned its attention to going toe-to-toe with such Titanal-laden powerhouses as the Enforcer 100, Bonafide 97 and M5 Mantra. Salomon’s new all-terrain series is called Stance, available in 90mm, 96mm and 102mm widths. Fighting fire with fire, the Stance series surround a poplar core with Titanal laminates, laced a dose of C/FX for added strength and damping.

The Stances are all comfortable at speed, which is useful as their flat, narrow tails keep them close to the fall line. Their design is a hybrid of sorts: the rear is built like a Frontside ski, while the forebody has the rocker and slightly softer torsional flex associated with all-mountain models. The front end keeps them calm in crud while the rear gives them the propulsion and precision to tear through any terrain.

Surely one of the goals of the Stance series is to win the hearts of aggressive experts who wouldn’t give a QST 99 or 92 a second look. While they may not wow everyone who tries them, all three are definitely contenders, putting Salomon in the game in a way they weren’t before.