2025 Rossignol Brand Profile

Overview

For most of the 1970’s, 80’s and into the 90’s, Rossignol was king of the roost, the most recognized trademark in a market crammed with brands that did not survive this epoch.  It built a race department that was the envy of all, with stars like Alberto Tomba and what seemed like every significant female racer in the world.   Eventually, maintaining its race stable became too expensive, other companies innovated while Rossi held eroding ground and Quicksilver’s brief flirtation with ownership did neither brand any favors. 

To recover from the Quicksilver debacle, Rossi needed a star product or two to restore the brand to retail relevance.  The rebound began with the core of the line, the Experience series, led technically by the ultra-powerful E98 and in sales by a model that remained a mainstay until its retirement, the E88. In 2013, the French brand re-staked its claim to carving excellence with the HP Pursuit.  In 2014, it knocked the cover off the ball with the Super 7, Squad 7 and Soul 7. 

It’s rare for skis as forgiving as the 7 Series to also deliver OMG performance, but Rossi found a fresh way to deliver the stability only length provides without making a Big Mountain ski feel big when flipping edge to edge.  With the Super 7, Rossignol restored the word “playful” to the Powder ski lexicon, a nearly forgotten attribute among these tanker-sized skis.

No sooner did the Soul 7 set every sales record for a Big Mountain ski than Rossi set about improving it, not just every few years, but every season. It followed its game-changing Carbon Alloy Matrix by reconfiguring its alluring Air Tip, integrating Air Tip 2.0 into the forebody and moving the contact point further forward.

Six seasons ago, this impulse to innovate was channeled into Rossi’s cornerstone Experience series.  The Experience collection was made more homogeneous, in both technology and graphic presentation, than the line it replaced. To review, the previous Experience generation altered construction with every step down the price ladder. In contrast, the 2019 Experience 94 Ti and 88 Ti shared the same story, Line Control Technology (LCT).  LCT is a vertical, central ribbon of Titanal, shrouded in a shock-sucking elastomer and embedded between wood laminates. It’s called “Line Control” because its role is to keep the ski from counterflexing, thereby maintaining snow contact and trajectory. 

In 2021, Rossi again took a scalpel to the forebody of the Experience flagships, trimming down the sidecut dimensions so the ski behaves more like a sedan than a sports car, particularly at the top of the turn.  The Experience 92 Ti Basalt and Experience 88 Ti Basalt retained the same technology package, so the choice between them was more about terrain ratios (e.g., 60/40 on-trail/off-trail) than skier talent level.  The Experience 84 AI was made for a less skilled skier, substituting ABS for Titanal in its version of LCT.

The big story four years ago was the debut of Blackops as a full-fledged family and the concomitant conclusion of the legendary 7 series. We may never again see a Big Mountain model dominate sales the way the Soul 7 did, but you can’t ride the same horse forever.  The Blackops collection represented a clean break with the past, but to tell its tale properly requires a quick review of recent history.

The Blackops project began in 2016/17 in response to athletes’ requests for a powder ski that didn’t oblige them to charge the fall line at warp speed. They asked for something more playful, supple and above all, twin-tipped; the ability to land backwards was essential. Another key component was a deeper sidecut that would allow a 118 to cut a short radius turn if it were laid over. Thus was born the Blackops 118, later to be rechristened as the Gamer.

The next step in the 3-year development of the Blackops clan was the creation of the Blackops 98, renamed the HolyShred for its public unveiling. Like its big bro the 118, the Blackops 98 was a twin-tip, but to upgrade its in-bounds behavior a Ti platform was added underfoot. Altering the length and width of the Ti plate allowed Rossi engineers to dial in the ideal flex for each size of the new Blackops. (Sidecut and baseline are also re-modeled for each length.) The development process that began with the secretive, athlete-driven Blackops 118 and the underground Blackops 98 led to the expanded lineup that materialized four years ago. 

As Rossi considered its options for a full line of Blackops to replace the 7 series, it became clear that not every advanced, all-terrain skier expected to be landing his or her airs in reverse, so the twin-tip feature wasn’t found elsewhere in the 2022 Blackops collection. The emerging star of the Blackops squad was the Sender Ti (106mm @ 187cm), that’s more powerful than the Soul 7 HD it replaced without being any harder to ski. The Sender Ti would indeed become the prototype for an entire Sender (and Rallybird) series of off-trail skis beginning in 2023.

The Blackops series represented a calculated choice to make a clean break with the recent past.  Relatively speaking, the Experience series changed very little in 2021, but this was the proverbial calm before the storm. In 2022, Rossi would steer the Experience clan in an entirely new direction.

Rossi had been tinkering with its Experience series for several years, but what the legendary French brand did three years ago was totally redefine it and redesign it from top to bottom.  Rossignol identified a new skier type and built the new Experience (EXP, for short) series around him and her. Rossi used the rubric “All-Resort” in lieu of “All-Mountain,” to underscore that this skier is a new breed. (Actually, Salomon used the term, “All-Mountain Resort” to define its XDR collection a few years ago, but the XDR models never had the market impact of the EXP’s, and Salomon wasn’t trying to define a new skier type.) 

To understand what Rossi did with its EXP skis, you must first grok that they’re made for a resort visitor who doesn’t intend to ski every day of his or her precious vacation. Skiing is on the agenda, of course, but the modern resort offers so much more, starting with an app that lets you record every Instagram-worthy second.

With so much to do and so little time, the skiing part needs to be simple. All EXP baselines are double-rockered, so they’re all equally able to swivel.  Viscoelastic elements in the forebody keep the center section calm, imparting a sense of perpetual security. It’s telling that the flagship ski, the EXP 86 Ti, was an All-Mountain East model, and all the narrower and/or lighter EXP’s reside in the Frontside genre, which is groomer country.

Rossignol is doubtless correct that a great many skiers engage with the sport for reasons that have nothing to do with tearing  à toute vitesse straight down the fall line.  Skiing with friends and family, being outdoors in the clean, winter air, enjoying the sunshine and soft snow is sufficient motivation for them. These are recreational skiers in the truest sense of that term. 

Given how Rossi has defined the target skiers for the latest Experience series, the line is a perfect fit for where and how they ski. Skiers who long for the E98 of yore can find their more developed skill set rewarded somewhere in Rossi’s massive Hero collection; the new Experience series has shifted its focus to serve the resort visitor who just wants to have fun. 

As I just laid out in copious detail, Rossi’s 2022 Blackops collection was an amalgamation of different designs and unrelated model names.  For 2023, Rossi decided to reorganize its assets into two distinct, albeit related, families: Sender Ti and Blackops. As the best of the 2022 hodgepodge, the Sender Ti deserved to become the focal point of the new collection. Just to be sure its star product was unmistakable, Rossi made the flagship Sender 106 Ti+ from a richer recipe than was used in the Sender 104 Ti and Sender 94 Ti.  The head of the Sender Ti family was a real-deal Power ski, while the 104 Ti and 94 Ti shared the same, Finesse-oriented construction. Complementing the unisex Sender Ti clan was a quartet of Rallybird models made for women.

The Sender Ti/Rallybird family are targeted at mainstream, directional skiers, which is all well and good, except that Blackops always stood for New School freeride antics, including riding switch. So Rossi kept the Blackops name to designate a pair of twintips it culled from the old Blackops clan: the 2022 Holy Shred became the 2023 (and 2024) Blackops 98, in two artsy, alternative cosmetics, while the erstwhile Gamer returned in the twin guise of the Blackops 118 Swamp or River, that take full advantage of their surface area to create lovely nature tableaux. (BTW, the Gamer/Blackops 118 has been renamed again, headlining the Sender Free series.)  To further capitalize on the Blackops mystique, Rossi created a 92mm-waisted option, with the youth-market-friendly MSRP of $529. 

The most important ski to debut last year was both on the cutting edge of current ski design and an homage to the most popular ski design of yesteryear, a race slalom ski adapted for recreational use. What makes the Rossignol Essential so innovative is its laser focus on recyclability and reducing the environmental impact of making a pair of skis. The justifiable fanfare over the initial successes of this project – detailed in our Realskiers’ review – tends to distract one’s attention from the usual matter of how well it performs on snow.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the Essential is a very good, if not great, ski. Back in the day, it might have been as popular as the legendary teal 4S K. Not too many Americans are still addicted to cobra-quick, close-to-the-fall-line carving that is the Essential’s wheelhouse, but I expect the early adapters who become Essential owners will be over-the-moon with its performance level.  Selecting a classic slalom model as the harbinger of a new way of making – and re-making – skis seems a curious choice in today’s all-terrain-obsessed market… until you ski it.

Rossi’s other major project initiative last year was a new Frontside family of unabashed carvers called Forza, that replaced the retiring React series. The name of the flagship, the Forza 70^o V-Ti, tells us that the target skier is a proficient, dual-track carver consistently capable of achieving a very high edge angle.  Mercifully, one doesn’t have to achieve a full 70 degrees of tilt to extract a silken carve, and the high taper angle between tip and tail gives the pilot a lot of control over turn shape.

The 2025 Season

In a tacit admission that the first execution of the EXP 86 Ti, the new “All-Resort” series’ putative flagship, left experts unimpressed, Rossignol has rolled out two new models to headline the lesser lights in the extensive EXP series. Dubbed the Arcade 88 and Arcade 84, they are considerably more connected than the EXP 86 Ti and EXP 82 Ti they replace.  They’re both well equipped with a slew of Rossi’s signature features, like the elegant Air Tip, VAS damping elements in the forebody, wall-to-wall Titanal in the 86 and a Ti mounting plate in the 84, plus Line Control Technology with an ABS spine, to keep the ski pinned to a carved turn.

While the new Arcades easily outperform their antecedents, neither re-sets the bar for their respective categories.  Rossi has once again scrambled its Sender and Rallybird collections, shifting the emphasis to soft, Finesse models tuned to the talents of unambitious intermediates.

If I sound unenthused by some of Rossi’s recent moves in its Alpine ski collection, it’s because I am. All the proof one needs that Rossi can still build great skis is evident in its extensive Hero family of race skis. Maintaining its presence on the World Cup gives the brand the televised presence necessary to safeguard its street cred and leverage its long history of racing prowess, thereby making it worth the massive investment winning on the Olympic stage requires. But outside this highly visible ski arena, Rossignol seems more focused on building its brand presence elsewhere.

If you scroll back through ski history far enough, you’ll come across an era when the best skiers on the mountain were all on race skis, without exception. Now the gulf between recreational ski equipment and race gear has never been deeper or wider.  Sure, some of the technology made for the race community trickles into consumer models, but race tech can be expensive and ill-suited for where and how the average skier skis. Point being, making really great non-race skis is still possible, but the cost of their development and manufacture will approach the cost of race skis. 

Hold that thought for a moment while I summarize the brand extensions Rossi has explored in the last several seasons: hiking boots, casual footwear, mountain bikes, ski clothing collections for men and women, casual outerwear, and at least two concept stores where they can showcase the lot.  To present all these product lines in the online omniverse is a breath-taking investment. 

Building a consumer franchise outside the ski channel has been a goal of many major hard goods brands over the years, so Rossi is hardly alone in their ambitions. It must drive Rossi management nuts that arch-rival Salomon has managed to build a world-wide business in footwear, not to mention a more robust online presence, the coin of the realm these days. But lost to modern memory, Salomon bled money for over a decade creating the foundation for its cross-channel success today. 

So, what’s my point?  I want Rossignol to be all it can be as a ski supplier. I want it to live up to its laureled history of making great skis for the everyday, all-mountain skier.  I want Rossi to stop spending its resources on quixotic adventures and rededicate itself to the people who helped build one of skiing’s most iconic brands.