As I pen this piece in the middle of February, 2024, the outlines of the 2025 American ski market are coming into ever sharper focus. Every important brand has not only pitched its next collection to its retail partners, most initial orders have already been written, setting the stage for what should be a very consumer-friendly spring as far as ski sales are concerned.
There are two key components that drive this looming shopping bonanza: the first, and most important, element is a slow-sales year that has a lot of the skis ordered preseason last year still on the shelves. Waiting in the wings is the second driver, orders for new models that will obsolete the current generation as soon as they show up. The classic solution to this conundrum is to sweeten the deal on the leftovers to make room for the newcomers, lowering the price on models that were considered state-of-the-art just a few weeks ago.
As I mentioned in Twilight of the Idols last month, some of the most coveted models of the last decade have reached the end of their product life-cycle. If you’ve ever wanted a Bonafide, Enforcer or Mantra – or a Black Pearl, Santa Ana or Secret 96 – you’ll never have a better chance to get it in the size you want than right now. In addition to this sextet of perennial sales leaders, generational model turnover is also impending at Atomic, Dynastar, Fischer, Head, Rossignol, Kästle and Liberty.
After a season in which only a handful of second-tier model families were re-vitalized with some sort of upgrade, the 2025 season is chock full of new models that I’m pleased to report are palpably superior to the generation they replace. While I’ve yet to ski every new model of note, most of what I’ve essayed so far have been very impressive. It’s reassuring to see so many brands investing in new designs that deliver high performance that reward good skiing without extracting a high toll in the effort department. With each passing birthday, I grow more appreciative of designs that exemplify this energy-conservation consciousness.
There are a couple of reasons why I find this year’s bumper crop of new skis so encouraging. In a seasonal market dependent on increasingly fickle weather, smart money might be tempted to slow down new product introductions to a bare minimum. That instead we see considerable market pressure to keep the innovation hammer down while keeping the incremental cost to consumers hovering around zero. (Most new models did not increase their MSRP for next year.)
Any time a new construction infiltrates a corner of a product line, it sets up the next few seasons for additional new models to roll out as the latest tech spreads across the collection. This is the second aspect of the 2025 U.S. market that gives me hope for the future: the seeds of change have now been planted across multiple product lines that will extend 2025’s new ideas well into the future. Timetables are already in place that will ensure a regular flow of model turnover, barring catastrophic intervention such as a second pandemic or a snowless season across the globe.
Calling All Ski Testers!
If you’re addicted to skiing – and, mercifully, many of you are – you get a special frisson of excitement whenever you step into a new pair of skis. After forty years of ski testing, I can attest that the thrill of trying out a freshly prepped pair of one of the best skis money can buy does not diminish over time. Gauging its receptivity to edging action, its capacity to shift into a drift on a whim, it’s inherent speed limit and a host of other attributes, is both a thrill and a skill. In the course of one or two runs – ideally in a variety of conditions – an experienced tester should be able to limn the limits of the model under review.
It is both to facilitate and to provide a record of this bundle of experiences that I’ve revised my test card into a new digital format that uses Google docs as its medium. Please note you don’t have to have a Google email address or any other Google functions, but if you do use Google Chrome or have a Google address, you’ll be able to edit your entries, should you so desire.
Veteran testers will note that I’ve modified the 10 test criteria just a tad to improve comprehension and to help compress the “card” to a space only slightly larger than the usual cell phone screen, limiting scrolling to a bare minimum. To make the chore of data entry go faster, testers enter their email address and shop affiliation only once, rather than re-entering this info for every submission. (If you’re a citizen tester without a shop affiliation, just enter the letter “C” as your associated shop.)
To help cast the widest net we can, in addition to the link below, we’ve posted a link to the new test card on the Realskiers.com home page, right below the Testimonials. (If you happen to be a shop tester who has used a digital test card accessed via a QR code, please do NOT use the old, 6-criteria card to which it connects.) If you are specialty retailer, you don’t have to be an official Realskiers Test Center to contribute; you just have to be willing to play. I look forward to seeing your data and comments!
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The Making of a Skier, Part IX: The ASTM, Carl Ettlinger and I
One of the many hats I wore as North American binding product manager for Salomon in the early 1980’s was that of delegate to the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). I believe the first meeting of F8.14 – the sub-committee on ski safety – that I attended was in Pennsylvania. I was flying under the wings of Salomon’s seer of all standards and patents, Gilbert Delouche, and the binding product manager for the North American zone at that time (and my mentor), Joe Campisi.
I was a babe in the woods, but I soon caught on to the game under Delouche’s patience guidance. I recall a debate on the binding specification then being batted around in the technical committee chaired by Carl Ettlinger. Ettlinger wanted language that would require any release/retention setting of 10 or above to be “visually distinctive” from the rest of the scale.
In Memorium, Carl Ettlinger
Carl was a giant of a man whose outsized voice roiled every conversation like a burst dam and whose expansive vision reached across the mixed milieus of research, journalism, risk management and education. I knew him when he was at the peak of his powers, as he explained to me when I interviewed him for a “where are they now?” profile in Skiing History. He was able to conduct long-term research on injury patterns as well as analyze the particulars of the current binding market, turn around and package this knowledge into articles for Skiing and Skiing Trade News, followed up by a workshop tour that would bring enlightenment to the grassroots level. No one but Carl could have pulled this off, and Lord knows no one has had the requisite talent, energy and will power since.
But time and tide wait for no man, and Carl’s finely spun web of influence was eventually plucked apart. The loss of his pivotal positions in the press allowed him to slip from public view before we, the skiers of the world, realized we hadn’t taken the time to thank him.
We have the time to thank him now.
So thanks, Carl, for being first and foremost a teacher, for teaching is at the heart of the evangel’s mission.
Thanks for being so damn stubborn. Your insistence on improving skier safety wore through a wall of resistance as tough as Vermont marble.
Thanks for having a heart as big as that melon-sized head of yours. The fuel to your tireless mind was a caring heart that tried to embrace the world.
Thanks for all the stories once the Mount Gay flowed. Who knew we would have won the Vietnam War if only his superiors had listened? I can’t remember exactly how – he wasn’t the only one drinking Mount Gay – but I recall the light in his eyes as he relayed his twisted tales, taking us down successive rabbit-holes of digression that I lost track of at the seventh level.
That’s what I remember most vividly about my many interactions with Carl: his brain so teemed with thoughts he rushed to get them out in a verbal jailbreak that would travel around the cosmos until returning, many lost minutes later, to the subject that had inspired them. That was Carl: too many words for one sentence, too many tasks to tend to and all of it, every erg of his endless energy, devoted to a cause he never ceased to serve.
Fare thee well, Carl Ettlinger. The world misses you already for it will never see another quite like you, whose every moment seemed larger than life itself.
I raise my glass to you, old friend. Mount Gay, of course.
Jackson Hogen
June 23, 2020
Why This Buyer’s Guide?
Don’t read the 2021 Masterfit Buyer’s Guide in Partnership with Realskiers.com for its 62 ski reviews. I should know. I wrote or edited all of them.
Not that the ski reviews aren’t worth the read. But ski reviews on the web are as common as rice, while the Buyer’s Guide contains something no other publication, whether in digital, print or video format, can claim: the most respected, thorough and dependable boot reviews in the world.
This isn’t mere puffery. The Masterfit Boot Test is so well regarded by the supplier community that nearly every brand not only sends its following year’s line-up in four men’s sizes plus three for women, it also dispatches its top designers and/or product managers to a distant North American site for most of the test’s five-day duration.
