RMU's Story

Often, this seems to be the natural progression for a lot of skiers as they begin to become more interested in the products themselves, how they are put together, and the technology behind them.  Our goal from the start was not to start an international company; little did we know the extent of the lessons that the industry had in store for us.  Rather, our goal from the beginning, as skiers, was simply to understand more about skis, skiing, and design for our own purposes.

Just like every skier we wanted to know more about the process so we began researching the process, equipment, and materials necessary with the same passion that we had previously brought to the table when researching new lines to ski, snow conditions, and weather patterns.

We’d love to tell you that our skis were amazing right from the first pair off the press-but this couldn’t be further from the truth. The first pair we pressed we could not even ski on.

The flex was way off, the shape was a little asymmetrical... knowing what we know now, even if we had been able to mount it, there wasn't enough fiberglass in the ski to retain the bindings! This was the challenge we had been looking for; we now had a starting point. So we picked up some wood charts, reworked our flex patterns, and built another pair.

This one was skiable... or at least, it looked to be.  The tuning equipment we were using in the garage those days wasn't state of the art, but the ski itself had a decent flex, the right amount of binding retention, and it looked almost like a real ski (except for the wooden sidewalls and cloth graphic).  After a week or two of skiing this pair, we were eager to try again, make new improvements, and implement what we had learned.  

As long-time locals to Summit County, it was only a matter of time until our friends became interested and wanted to try our ridiculous skis. This process continued for what must have been 15 pairs of skis before we got our first inquiry call.  

In our first year, we built 30 pairs of skis and sold them all.  We didn't make much of a profit, and we weren't getting paid back then, but it didn’t matter: we were learning.  With the cash from the 30 pairs, we figured we could paint a couple more houses and double our order to 75 for the following year.  Our group was willing to go to work to raise the funds that would allow us to then go build the skis, knowing full well that we might not expect to see a dollar- but we knew that this approach to our budding business couldn’t last forever.  Additionally, we were having finishing problems, and our local shop mountain wave was letting us beat up their machines for the post-production, but this was beginning to take it's toll; we needed a better plan.  We looked at several options, but one thing was clear; we wanted to keep the brand in the us.  Tim and Tracy from never summer really went out of their way and in many ways took us under their wing, and they helped us build and scale the business, and they offered us tips and tricks that would help us with everything from retail distribution, to cash flows, to manufacturing tools that would help us become very consistent across every ski we built.  With never summer, we scaled from 75 pairs that second year to over 500 in our third.

In 2011, RMU won an innovation in design award from ISPO.  We were given free booth space at the tradeshow, and we were featured in multiple international media channels.  Our time at the show was filled with inquires of distributors from all over the world- the only problem was, this meant we would need someseriouscapital to deliver the orders that we would soon be receiving.  We were all still working other full time jobs and traveling everyday we had off- we quickly realize that we had really hit a decision point.