OVERVIEW Until recently, K2 reigned over the US market for so long its leadership had practically become a cliché. The keys to their sustained success were manifold, but from a product standpoint it’s not hard to summarize: K2’s are easy to ski. Regardless of your...
OVERVIEW Today’s Kästle has adopted one of skiing’s venerable names, but behaviorally the skis they are crafting in the present share zero DNA with the skis the brand made in the past. We know whereof we speak because we skied the Austrian Kästles of thirty years ago...
OVERVIEW Line has come a long way in its brief history without ever straying very far from home. We can’t think of another well-distributed ski brand that began life making handmade skiboards, which in case you’ve forgotten, were the super-shorties barely long enough...
Völkl didn’t actually invent the concept of quality control, but denizens of our little corner of the universe can be forgiven for thinking so. It set the standard for base finish for so long, if someone gave a trophy for the best QC they’d have to name it the Völkl...
Our spider sense tingles when we hear the term “handmade” applied to skis, as the implication is that such slats will receive extraordinary care in manufacture no mass-produced ski can hope to receive. One reason we look sideways at the “handmade” adjective is that...
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...
