Overview
K2 once reigned over the US market for so long, its sales leadership practically became a cliché. The keys to its sustained success were manifold, but from a product standpoint it’s not hard to summarize: K2’s have always been easy to ski. Regardless of your skill level, your terrain preferences or your gender, there’s a K2 for you and chances are you’ll love it. Given K2’s longstanding preeminence, just about every American with 20 years on the snow has owned a K2 at some point, creating a groundswell of skier-to-skier endorsements that has kept the K2 ball rolling even when, on occasion, it’s been deflated.
It’s been several years since the investment group Kohlberg & Company acquired K2 (along with a fistful of other ski brands). It’s impossible to effect much change in year one, so it was no surprise the ski collection didn’t move much in 2019. But while the Pinnacle design limped to the finish line two years ago, R&D was preparing a sweeping overhaul of K2’s men’s and women’s core collections. The limited quantity of the new Mindbender series available in the spring of 2019 were snapped up by eager consumers, auguring well for a brand rebound. But K2 skimped on the design of the first-generation Mindbenders in an attempt to grab more gross margin at the expense of product quality, echoing the miscues of the first-year, foam-core Pinnacles.
The women’s market has always been vitally important to K2 – 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the K2 Alliance – and the current collection shows admirable gender balance. For every unisex Mindbender, there’s a Mindbender W model to match. The ladder of women’s Mindbenders extends from the Mindbender 85 W, pitched to the intermediate market, all the way to the Mindbender 116C W, one of the fattest made-for-women models you can find. All but the lowest price point models use women’s specific cores and tooling.
The ski line overhaul that began with the Mindbenders continued in 2021 with an all-new Technical/Frontside series dubbed Disruption and the return of a twin-tipped collection named Reckoner. The headliners of the original Disruption series were 5 Technical models – an arena where K2 has been all but invisible – 3 for men and 2 for women. The signature technology for the Titanal models is a tip-to-tail band called Ti I-Beam; full length carbon stringers energize the non-Ti Disruptions.
Twintips have always found a home in the K2 collection, a space occupied by the Reckoner family since 2021, playful, carbon-powered twins originally sold in 102mm, 112mm and 122mm waist widths. Now expanded to 5 men’s models and 3 for women, the Reckoners are all about smeared turns and aerial acrobatics. If the mountain looks like a series of linked launch pads to you, the Reckoners are ready to send you into orbit.
For the 2023 season, K2 not only significantly improved its cornerstone Mindbender Ti collection, it created a whole new off-piste family, dubbed Dispatch. The envisioned Dispatch skier wasn’t into touring, per se, but was more of a powder hound focused on thrilling descents, however he’s able to access them. The 3-model series, at 101, 110 and 120 widths, was clearly targeted at the off-trail world, but with the accent on the descent, not the ascent. Whatever skier the Dispatch was trying to attract failed to materialize in an over-served backcountry market, and the Dispatches were themselves dispatched after one unmemorable season.
The arrival of Dispatch caused K2 to subtly shift the emphasis of its established Mindbender collection to all-terrain, lift-assisted skiing. Accompanying the shift in accent was a product change that was truly transformational: K2 altered all the dimensions of the Y-Beam Titanal laminate that governs how the ski grips. The Y-Beam fork in its forebody was given a new shape, as was its tail section, which moved most of its mass towards the rear. The elevation in on-piste performance was stunning – partly because the prior effort was so lame – making the Mindbender 99 Ti and Mindbender 89 Ti the most improved models in their respective categories two years ago.
The 2026 Season
It’s hard to notice things that aren’t there, so you might not have registered that we didn’t cover K2 last year, and I’m continuing the embargo until K2 is sold to owners who give a shit.
Here’s the problem: K2 is part of a bundle of ski-related brands sold by one bunch of private equity creeps to another a few seasons ago. When the time came to flip the investment – a certainty where private equity is concerned – they bungled the hand-off, missing their best opportunity to sell. Once that deal was scuttled, K2 began off-loading marketing expenses and onloading stupid decisions.
Trying to maximize their margins by lowering their costs has been baked into K2’s corporate mentality since the brand moved production to China, a move they might learn to rue in the not-so-distant future. Remember the Pinnacle series, launched around the same time K2 began making some fairly dreadful boots? The ski core was comprised mostly of “Nano,” which in English is spelled, f-o-a-m. They did some error-correction in year two, but the Nano crap remained, albeit in a somewhat smaller dose. The same scenario repeated itself in the first generation of Mindbenders, when K2 tried to use as little metal as it could get away with, which turned out to be too little, so once again it had to beef up its original effort to make an acceptable product.
The first Mindbenders were dressed like they were attending a funeral, in a dull, lusterless black, and the cosmetics have only gotten worse since then. Once upon a time, K2 had the best graphics in the business – it was a huge driver of the brand’s success for many years. K2 has tried to lionize the apparently blind person in charge of ski cosmetics in trade PR, but you can’t talk your way past hideous. If grotesque graphics were its only problem, they could be fixed overnight. But the current iteration of K2 is bad to the bone.
For the past several seasons, I’ve been praying for K2’s owners to cut the iconic American brand from the herd of companies it’s bundled with so it could be sold to someone with their toes in the snow instead of larceny in their hearts. Elevate Outdoors’ reorganization efforts in the recent past have made this hoped-for scenario virtually impossible, so I don’t see much hope for a K2 renaissance anytime soon. For a brand that had a Midas touch in the relatively recent past, K2’s plunge into the abyss of direct-to-consumer sales is as shocking as it is sad.