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 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.
Such is K2’s strength that you probably didn’t even realize it’s currently on the ropes, the result of several successive crunching body blows. The brand switched manufacturing facilities last season, which contributed to late or cancelled deliveries. Concurrently, the ski line made its most significant change in basic construction since the turn of the century, a concatenation of events that can’t have been helpful. Meanwhile, back in the boardroom, Rubbermaid, a brand with no previous – or even imaginable – connection to ski culture, acquired K2’s parent company, Jarden. Management who had for years successfully guided K2 to profitability despite a declining market, widely respected people with deep roots in the ski trade, are now back to being toes-in-the-snow skiers.
Forgotten in the ensuing hullaballoo was the departure two years ago of Rich Greene, a K2 cosmetics consigliore who played no small part in the brand’s growth. Among the features absent in the collections since Greene’s departure is an energetic visual style, otherwise known as rack appeal.
The 2017 Season
When you’re only able to ship a fraction of your orders for the previous season, said season then delivers a stillborn New England market, and you have new owners, adding a lot of new SKU’s to the product mix probably isn’t a priority. So K2 limited their off-season ambitions to extending the Pinnacle product line down to a 88mm-waisted model, a touch-up to the pivotal iKonic 85 Ti, and the re-injection of a Pep Fujas pro model, the Marksman.
For the fairer sex, a K2 focus since before a women’s market existed, K2 has applied the Pinnacle treatment to its wider, Freeride models, the altered Luv Boat 105 and FulLUVit 95 and all-new AlLUVit 88. The cores of these models are a fusion of K2’s Konic technology, with a central channel of Nanolite; and Bioflex, a women’s specific wood core made from Aspen and Paulownia. The result is a lightweight off-trail design that works best in its wider incarnations.