Five Years. Still Red.

Magnus's ski contract was running out. Mine too, more or less. Every autumn the same ritual: a new deal, sometimes a new logo on the tips, a new set of people telling you what to say. And every autumn the same feeling, that the people who actually live this thing should have more say in it.

He picked up on the fourth ring. I skipped hello and asked if his contract was up for renewal. "Yeah," he said, a little hesitant, the way you answer when you can tell a question has a second half. So I gave him the second half. Don't sign. We should start our own company. "It's kind of a now or never scenario." He didn't need long.

Then I called Lucas and told him Magnus was in. Then Alex and told him the other two were in. Three calls, three yeses. I couldn't believe it.

Anton was never on the list. He was at a dinner with the homies when the plan came up and he got that look in his eye. The one where he thinks he knows something you don't. "Give me four days," he said, "and I'll present why I should be in." Four days later he presented. It was a good one. He's our CEO now.

A few weeks later Alric called. "Woah, hold on a second. This train ain't leaving without me."

So that was six.

The back room

The office was the back room of an audiobook studio in Stockholm, built for one person reading quietly into a microphone. We put six grown men in it, a couple of tables and a lot of coffee.

The how was short, mostly because the answer was ugly. Building skis is hard even with a lot of money, and none of us had a lot. The ski bum lifestyle doesn't leave you with a massive savings account. So we scraped together what we had, and luckily we knew some people at a factory in Sweden who were willing to do us a solid and build a small run. Small because that was all we could afford. Then we got to the question that took the whole morning: why. Not because we didn't know. Because there were so many answers.

The first answer was the obvious one. We were leaving great ski brands to do this, and some of us were still skiing for a living, so the skis had to be freakin great. There was no other option. We'd spent years obsessing over flex and pop on other people's skis, now we'd get to obsess on our own. And there was one thing we'd all quietly hated: selling the exact same ski year after year with a new topsheet and calling it "the new one". Everyone does it. It feels like a scam. Let's not do that. Everyone nodded.

The second answer came from the corner. "I'm not doing this unless we do it as clean as it can possibly be done. Not clean for a ski brand. Clean." More nodding, a bit slower, because that one was going to cost us.

The third answer is the one we still talk about. Alric said that skis were the least interesting part. Skiing had never been about skis. It was about the people, the places, the stranger on a beach on the other side of the world who turns out to be a skier and is suddenly your friend. That culture raised us. We owed it. If we were going to do this, the skis had to be a way of paying it back and keeping the whole thing moving.

Nobody nodded.

Six people started talking at once, all saying the same thing six different ways, which is the closest we've ever come to a mission statement.

What six people with no plan actually did

Let's be honest about what we had. Six skiers, a tiny back room with bad air, and a reason we'd written down so we couldn't talk ourselves out of it later. That's it. No warehouse, no retailers, no logo anyone had seen before.

On paper we looked better than that. Between us there were X Games medals, film parts people still quote, a couple of decades of skiing for other people's logos, and someone who had at least winged it and built a much simpler business before. Not that any of us actually knew how to run a company. But that's just a resume. The thing that mattered in the room was that all six of us had grown up in this culture, owed it everything, and had never made a ski in our lives.

What we did have was that factory. Åre ski factory, a stone's throw from the peak of Åre, the skiing capital of Sweden, where a small crew has been building skis and snowboards by hand since 1981. The two guys who started it in their parents' garage are still on the floor. We walked in thinking we knew skis. We walked out knowing we didn't, and we've been learning from them every week since.

Then we hit publish. Three skis with our name on them. Park, All Mountain, Powder. All red. No graphics, no seasonal repaint, nothing to make last year's pair look old. People kept asking when the new colourway was coming. It wasn't. That was the whole idea.

Five years later

We're still here, which honestly surprised a few people. Some of them were us.

The three skis became four. I grew up alpine skiing. Loved the skiing, hated the rules. My coach, who was also my dad, kept telling me to widen my stance, and I kept not doing it. Turning is still a big part of how I ski. Carve exists because turning is one of the most fun things you can do on a pair of skis, especially when nobody's telling you how to do it.

Then four became five. Freeride. "Screw the piste" was the whole brief for that one. I'd be lying if Shane McConkey's water ski run in Alaska didn't have something to do with it.

The six became a lot more than six. Not skis this time. People. Anni Kärävä has taken our skis to two Olympics, and on the World Cup tour she's got six podiums and a Big Air gold to show for it. Pierre invents tricks you can't picture even after you've watched them. Alaïs holds it down in film parts and at Jib League. Theo runs style clinics at the World Rookie Tour whether he means to or not. Fien makes her own full-length movies. And this summer Martin brought us all the way to Australia, moving like it's still 2010 with tricks from 2040.

We've made friends at other brands along the way. Haglöfs, Kang, Capeesh, FabPatch. None of it was a logo swap. It was long, stubborn R&D on the things we were missing and couldn't find anywhere. Take the experience of a brand that has been perfecting the function of a product for decades, add how we want to look and what a skier actually needs right now, and sweat every detail until it adds something new to the table. Products we honestly couldn't find elsewhere, so we made them.

The sustainability promise from the back room turned out to be one of the hardest ones to keep. Last year an outside party went through the whole company line by line and certified us as a B Corp. For a company our size that process is long, and it costs time we don't really have, which is exactly why we're so proud of it. We also know exactly where we're still weak, and we're on it.

And the skis went places. Germany, Switzerland, France, the US, Norway, Canada, and a load of places we didn't see coming. Every single pair bought directly from us, by a skier, with no big corporation in the middle. That was the plan in the tiny office. It still is.

The next five

We're still small. The industry is still run by very large companies. We still think the people who keep skiing alive should be the ones holding the power. The difference is that we no longer say it six different ways. Somewhere in these five years it turned into four words, and all of us say them the same.

Thank you for five years. Tell us where to go next. We actually read it.

KEEP THE CULTURE MOVING.

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