Every few years I take a deep dive into the women’s ski market, partly to re-visit the latest trends in the overall...
Checking in on the 2024 Women’s Market
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Revelations
Re-Thinking the Fundamentals
What if you had the chance to start over with a clean slate, not with something as monumental as a relationship -...
Fit the Whole Skier
We bootfitters are naturally obsessed with feet, but the best bootfitters don’t just fit feet; they fit the whole skier. The “whole skier” includes more than just a quick survey of the lower leg and how it’s connected to the foot. It’s even more than all of the skier’s physical attributes, which include not only height and weight, but seated posture, stance, kinesthetic wiring, arch health and stiffness throughout the kinetic chain; the whole skier also includes his or her history with the sport and, most importantly, what sort of skier he or she wants to be.
One of the most obvious traits about almost all boot customers is his or her gender. (Please forgive me if I don’t overcomplicate what should be a simple point about body type.) The first step in a sales process that consists of winnowing all possible boots down to one is picking from the pile of unisex boots or the alternative world of women’s boots.
No-brainer, right? Not so fast. What if a particular woman were tall, with a long tibia and a tapered calf? Let’s add to her profile that she’s a good athlete with a background in dance. Up to now, she’s only been an occasional skier who rented her gear, but a new beau has persuaded her to take a deeper dive. She already has her season pass.
Just How Strange Will the 21/22 Ski Market Be?
To (temporarily) kowtow to the cult of brevity, the short answer is, “not very.”
To elaborate, most major ski brands didn’t derail the introduction of new products that were in the works well before the pandemic dropped the hammer. There’s a rhythm to the product renewal cycle that shifts the spotlight every year to a different model family within any brand’s global collection; that rhythm was largely respected despite the unique obstacles imposed on the process this year. If most of the models appearing in 21/22 catalogs seem similar to what was offered this year, it’s because this is how the line renewal machinery ordinarily operates.
What’s difficult to judge from outside the R&D pipeline is what we’re not seeing. That is, were there more new models or upgrades to existing star products ready to launch that were put on hold to avoid overloading a potentially weakened distribution network? Possibly; what might have been a planned six-model launch may have been trimmed to three or four, for example.
Happily, there’s no real downside to this scenario for the prospective ski buyer. All essential model family refreshing and line extensions will unfold as forecast. If you haven’t bought a ski in three or four years – I believe the average span between new ski purchases is over seven – the entire universe of Alpine skis is new to you. You may spot some names you recognize, but the skis that bear the name will almost assuredly be different.
How It Works.
Why You Should Buy From People Who Know What They’re Doing And Have Your Best Interests at Heart Everyone wants a...
The Things We Do for Love
Dear Readers who regularly devour my weekly Revelations know that I have already written at length on the subject of Why Skiers Are Better than Everyone Else. Last Friday I was reminded of my timeless prose as I spent 45 minutes traversing a very short stretch of road that connects I-80 to Route 89, my proscribed path to Alpine Meadows. As I voluntarily descended into this automotive miasma, I could make out the dim form of the interstate traffic snaking down from the west, two dense strands of tightly linked vehicles stretching beyond the horizon.
“How Is It in The Bumps?”
This question is one of the last objections a ski buyer tosses into the flow of the sale just as the salesperson has guided it to the brink of consummation. To keep the impending close on course, the suave salesperson will hedge the issue with some bland reassurance without raising the obvious retort, that no ski can overcome all the many and curious ills that plague the untalented mogul skier.
A great skier can manage bumps no matter what ski he or she is on. That doesn’t mean experts don’t have favorite skis for this spine-rattling condition, but they don’t need to change skis just because they encounter a bump field. They’ll manage, and chances are anyone watching them won’t be able to tell if the ski is helping, hurting or just along for the ride.
To get the subject out of the way, there are such things as mogul skis, but they’re made for competitors, not your everyday, all-terrain skier. Their tiny (61mm-66mm) waists and svelte sidecuts were common 25 years ago, but they’re as rare as bacon at a bar mitzvah today. Unless you’re planning to compete, there’s no reason for you to fish in this pond.
In Praise of the Wandering Mind
This subject has been percolating in the subterranean strata of my noggin for several months, searching for the connections that will lend it substance. The search for this topic’s handles has a wedding-cake’s worth layers: to depict the wandering mind requires its engagement, a self-cancelling concept that would oblige me to catch and release the idea in a Sisyphean quest to define its merits.
The notion of expounding on this Möbius strip of an idea was, naturally, an example of the wandering mind in action. I might have been noodling on a question several of my Dear Readers have posed, which can be distilled to, how did I ever learn to write in the manner that I do?
To find my answer, I had to relax my grip on the subject. My reasoning self was ready with mechanical answers, such as the discipline of writing every day. Duly noted, but insufficient. Let’s wander a little further.
Realskiers.com Trounces Field to Earn Second Stump-Bertoni Prize for Excellence
In a stunning upset that in retrospect appears inevitable, Realskiers.com has been awarded The Stump-Bertoni Prize for Excellence for the second year in a row.
For those cave-dwellers who snoozed through Realskiers.com’s first triumph in this gilded competition, permit me to bring you up to speed. Then as now, the battle for this cherished trophy (metaphorically speaking – the S-BP lacks sufficient funds for a memento commensurate with its prestige) was fierce, extending both of its eponymous founders to previously unknown limits.
The final ballot was determined by leg wrestling over Stump’s furious protest; he cogently argued that this sort of bias against the vertically challenged has no place in a free society. Bertoni imperiously overruled Stump’s evermore strident complaints, citing a lack of legible documentation, tardy submissions and a tendency to perspire copiously when provoked.
This year’s competition was no less fraught.
The Savvy Shopper: How to Buy Skis
Let’s begin with a recap of the fundamentals.
Realskiers’ model selection methodology starts by dividing the Alpine ski market into seven categories, using waist width as the organizing principle for three excellent reasons:
1. This dimension is the single best indicator of the ski’s capabilities.
2. Waist width is a hard number, not a fuzzy concept like skier type.
3. Suppliers product lines align with this method, creating models in every category according a coherent pricing logic.
Yard Sale! When Going Big Goes Wrong
If you’ve been a lifelong skier, you’ve not only experienced failure; most likely you’ve survived at least one miscalculation so soul-scarring, its time capsule is enshrined in the halls of memory alongside weddings and funerals.
As inspiration and prod to memory, allow me to recount a vignette from my days as a freestyle competitor. The location is Keystone, Colorado, the event, The Chicken of the Sea Freestyle Classic, a sponsorship coup that couldn’t have been too tough to land as Ralston Purina owned both the resort and the tuna.
I qualified via a preliminary aerial competition, taking a conservative tack by throwing a mule kick, hardly daring when going upside down was common. But my modest move was clean and hung out to dry, with a barely discernible, weightless pause at its apex.