When I first raised the topic of composing a weekly newsletter with Realskiers.com founder Peter Keelty, he coughed, bit down on the Salem that was forever dangling from his lips and curtly advised me that I would run out of topics in a month.
This will be the 332nd Revelation I’ve posted since Keelty dismissed the idea back in 2013.
One could be forgiven for supposing that much of this cobweb-covered content has outlived its usefulness, but having recently revisited all of them, I’d surmise that the vast majority have at least some measure of relevance and most could be re-posted today. To drive this point home, the Realskiers home page will henceforth feature a fresh-albeit-former Revelation every week.
To make navigation through this trove less cumbersome, I’ve created 22 topics that bundle like-minded essays so subscribers can search by subject matter. (Please note that access to the Revelations Archive is a Realskiers’ subscriber benefit.) Topics include such predictable fare as Boot Buying Advice, most of the chapters of Snowbird Secrets and, of course, Ski Buying Advice. But there is also an array of musings on such disparate subjects as ski technique, the death of ski journalism and installments of my personal skiing odyssey, The Making of a Skier.
So, what do we learn about today’s ski gear market by examining the minutia of the last decade or so? That on a fundamental level, very little has changed. All skis are made of essentially the same stuff, only a ratio here and there has changed to provide just enough differentiation to allow all brands to claim their concoction is the best. Brands can only make what their factories are set up to make. An apt comparison would be the world of fine cooking: everyone has access to the same ingredients, and once they procure their hardware, they are limited to what that hardware (e.g., ovens, sundry cooking tools) is able to make. Nobody has a monopoly on any essential ingredients, be they basics like eggs and flour, or exotica like oysters or Kobe beef.
Trendlines
As we pick through the recent past, a few trends emerge that appear to have legs. From a PR standpoint, the most attention-grabbing arena concerns converting the ski gear lifecycle into a more eco-friendly process. Ski making in particular has always been a messy business, but factories have been gradually cleaning up their act, an evolution that began decades ago with the adoption of sublimation in lieu of silk-screening for decorating topskins. Today the emphasis is on using more recycled materials and devising a means of corralling skis at the end of their useful life rather than adding them to the world’s landfills. It bears noting that there are no short-cut solutions in the recycling initiative, so skiing’s collective efforts in this department will continue to be newsworthy.
The pandemic left a deep sitzmark in the ski trade, shutting down the 2020 season in a single stroke before reversing field and turbo-charging the in-resort ski business while sending the sales of Alpine Touring (AT) gear into the stratosphere. An entire genre of hybrid boots emerged, populated mostly with alpine designs with a “hike mode.” The bulge in equipment sales ending up creating a clog in the inventory pipeline that would take the better part of three seasons to clear. There must be a quarter-million pairs of nearly new touring skis (and attendant accoutrements) clogging ski lockers across America, the residue of the discovery that skinning uphill for hours on end is hard.
Another arena with a curious path to its current state of affairs is the women’s market. One of the fun facts about the last decade is that the number one selling ski in the U.S.A. was a women’s model, Blizzard’s Black Pearl, a ski originally conceived as a copy of the brand’s unisex ski that morphed into a genuinely “designed by women for women” model that has further evolved into a full-fledged family under the same Black Pearl moniker.
What the Pearl’s boffo success disguises is a market where most “women’s” models are the same as the men’s models, albeit with a different size range. The wider the model, the greater the likelihood that it’s the men’s version, which means that in the all-important All-Mountain East genre (home of the 85mm-94mm waist), for the most part, men’s and women’s models are all but indistinguishable.
While I would never presume to give equipment advice to the race community, any discussion of trends in alpine skiing has to include mention of the ever-widening gap between race gear and civilian set-ups. Once upon a time, there was only one avatar of skiing, and it was the racer, with a skill set a recreational skier could aspire to (if only feebly imitate). Now there is very little connective tissue between alpine racing and the in-resort ski experience. This isn’t perforce good or bad, it’s just where we find ourselves now, a more fragmented community.
If one spends time perusing the 45 archived Revelations about boots and bootfitting, you’ll find that the advice on how a proper bootfit should proceed hasn’t changed. (See The First Five Minutes, posted October 18, 2016.) But over the course of the last two seasons, the BOA® internal cable system has replaced buckles – either in the forefoot, the cuff, or both – providing skiers of all abilities a choice in closure systems that didn’t exist three seasons ago.
The Realskiers Archives aren’t limited to deep reserves in the Revelations department; they also encompass five years of podcasts (Realskiers with Jackson Hogen) and hundreds of our renowned long-form ski reviews, sorted by season. It could be the curriculum for a master’s class in the evolution of the U.S. ski market.
It is my solemn duty to remind all my Dear Readers and Dear Listeners that first-time subscribers pay only $24.95 to open this vault of insights, and recurring subs are only $19.95. This modest fee includes the right to contact me directly with whatever gear queries you have, a service I feel confident in saying isn’t available anywhere else.
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The Things We Do for Love, Part II
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.
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.
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.
