For the past two summers, we have had the opportunity to travel to Europe for Rossignol ski picking. While we have been picking Rossi skis for nearly two decades, we previously did so from the US warehouse in Ogden, Utah. This arrangement worked well, although we often wished for a larger volume of skis to select from.
Rossignol has now restructured their operations, allowing us to select skis directly from their much larger European inventory. This aligns Rossi with how we manage our other brands and was made possible by the efforts of Jeff Courter, Global Technical Product Manager for the Nordic Division, and Evan Pengelly, Nordic Category Manager for North America. Both Jeff and Evan are long-time friends and joined us on these picking trips. Foss Kerker, Nordic Ski Product and Race Coordinator, also assisted us in finding the fastest skis. It's a small Nordic world: my wife used to nanny for Evan's children, and Foss's father did the landscaping plan at my home.
Over the last two summers, we picked skis in both Spain and France. Rossi has a small R&D and World Cup ski production facility in France, but the majority of their production occurs in Artes, Spain. Notably, an increasing percentage of World Cup athletes are now using skis produced in Spain. Ten years ago, this was 0%, and it is now over 50% and growing. This is a targeted effort to integrate World Cup-winning camber designs into bulk production as quickly as possible. They achieve this by using our load cell technology to feed World Cup results back into production.
Julien Robert, the Director of R&D for Nordic Products, is particularly impressive. With my engineering background, I have worked with many technical professionals, and Julien stands out not only for his technical skills but also for his passion and humility. These qualities have been instrumental in the success of their newer Premium skis. The Premium SX skate ski, Rossi's latest creation, is delivering top results in all snow types. Historically, Rossi excelled on firm and medium snow, but the new SX design now covers soft and medium snow, rounding out their product lineup. We've seen great success with this ski; Gus Schumacher notably won the 2024 Wirth World Cup on the SX, even on snow that wasn't particularly soft.
We were fortunate to tour the factories in both France and Spain and then spent several days meticulously selecting from thousands of skis. We now have an amazing selection of Rossi skate, classic, and skin skis.
If you are interested in a pair, or multiple pairs, please reach out directly or via our ski request form.
