The Future of Skiing

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The Custom Ski Builder

Step through the door of Wagner Custom Skis and you’ll see dozens of colorful top sheets leaning against red walls. Standing up to greet you is Pete Wagner, the owner, a boyish 34-year-old with a messy Beatles haircut. His custom ski factory is in Placerville, Colorado, a dozen miles downvalley from Telluride. In 2006, Wagner opened the shop in a building that once housed a gas station.

Chatting as we walk back toward the presses and computer design stations, it quickly becomes clear that he knows everything and everyone in the custom-ski world. Even that mohawked dude in the Mammoth parking lot who’ll fire up power tools and cut you a pair of skis during lunch if you slide him $300. Wagner knows how much skiers enjoy saying, Yeah, I own custom skis. But he knows you’d be a damn fool to waste a minute of precious winter on skis built during lunch in a parking lot.

He knows that a well-fitted ski maximizes a skier’s potential. “A custom-fit boot performs better. Same with custom-fit skis. The big companies can’t tailor products to each skier. We can,” Wagner says. “World Cup racers get custom skis so they can ski their absolute best. The way I see it, our factory’s basically a World Cup race room for recreational skiers.”

Making a custom ski is a complicated process. Unlike that dude in Mammoth, Wagner has you fill out an eight-page questionnaire, which helps determine your “skier DNA.” Computers in an upstairs aerie digest your feedback and create a ski recipe just for you. Then they transmit it down to the factory floor. Whereas some custom builders merely offer you a choice of several shape templates, Wagner forms what he calls “a complex 3-D jigsaw puzzle of your proposed ski.” His production team then builds your skis by hand, using cores of premium hardwood like maple and ash, and extra-thick base material and oversize edges to defend against rock damage.

So what? Custom builders less meticulous than Wagner have long delivered dream boards to skiers. In the last 10 years, more than a dozen custom ski builders have opened for business across North America, emboldened by computer design programs, cheap used presses, and no-cost internet marketing.

Wagner, though, owns a résumé that garage tinkerers can’t match. He grew up in Dayton, Ohio, skiing a 300-vertical-foot molehill 10 minutes from his house, and later studied mechanical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He got a job designing high-performance golf-club shafts, creating carbon-fiber models for pros such as John Daly. After earning an MBA from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Wagner could have gone to Wall Street. Instead he spent seven winters in Telluride, working golf R&D at night and skiing by day. Eventually, he tweaked his software to conceive gear for mountains instead of country clubs.

Wagner boards cost between $1,500 and $2,000 and he only makes six pairs a week. “Lots of craftsmanship goes into it,” he says. Indeed, Wagner even worries about what music plays during ski assembly. Recently, that music was pleasant world beat. “It’s the same theory as The Hidden Messages in Water, which holds that music can affect the health of a snow crystal,” Wagner says. “We think music also affects the pressing of skis.”  —Rob Story

Photo by William Woody.