‘A few years ago, during a brief stint as product manager for a major ski factory, I had the opportunity to name some products. I did a pretty undistinguished job of it, but was able to kill off some really bad ideas. For instance, there was a move afoot to name one of our skis after a certain weapon system—a system which later proved more efficient at shooting down Iranian passenger jets than Iraqi Scuds.
When deep-sidecut skis came over the horizon, the design constraint for our product was that the ski presses couldn’t handle a mold wider than 100mm. This meant that the shovel of the ski could be no wider than about 98 mm and any fooling around with sidecut shape would have to depend on changing the waist width from model to model. Initial thinking was that we’d build a nice waist for beginners, a medium-width waist for intermediates and a narrow waist for radical-arcing dudes.
In pitching this idea to ski schools, we initially talked about calling the system the Graduated Width Method. But in case you haven’t looked at the *Village Voice* personals lately, GWM stands for gay white male. Eventually, a perfectly good marketing concept never got out of the office, for want of a decent name. Elan has now “solved” the problem with Graduated Sidecut System (the acronym GSS fairly glides off the tongue, don’t it?).
The industry has flailed around long enough, seeking a catchy name for this product category. The magazines tried Super Sidecut and Hourglass. Every ski company in the world wanted its own trademarked title: SCX, Ergo (short for ergonomic), Carver, Karve, Radarc, Magic, CarvX. In fact, Xanything. Mike Adams at Elan came up with Parabolic, a word no one understood, but it sounded cool and quickly became as generic as Kleenex Brand Snotrag Tissues. Few of the names came close to describing what the new skis were supposed to do (Volkl’s Carver came closest), so they proved horribly confusing to the average skier.
Partly as a result of his genius for product names, Adams has recently been steering the Salomon barge in North America. The company is a leader in the race to rename the very short ski. The Salomon entry is SnowBlade, which is supposed to associate the product with in-line skating.
How can you name a short ski? Let me count the ways. If you were born before Pearl Harbor, you probably called them goon skis. Thereafter you might have seen a kurzski (gesundheit!), a Serie R, a firngleitner (or figl), a GLM(r?), a HeadStart, a Brief, a Lynx, a BigFoot, a PowderBlade, a skiboard, a bootski, a snowskate, a Sled Dog. You can probably think of more.
These things come in a myriad of shapes, for a myriad of customers. Some of these products are frankly aimed at beginners or non-skiers. Some are aimed at snowboarders. Some are aimed at experienced skiers who want to try something new. As usual, the industry is doing an inadequate job of explaining the differences.
Now the confusion is slopping over into boot and binding issues. Firngleitners and BigFoot skis have always been sold with non-releasing bail bindings, for use with climbing boots or mukluks as well as ski boots. All very well if the ski is too short to break your ankle, but Gordon Lipe, a safety guru of another time, would not have approved. Now some of the shorties are available mounted with non-releasing snowboard bindings. Salomon, for instance, managed to convince the brilliant editors at *Wired* magazine that SnowBlades so equipped are some kind of genuine technical advance, on par with the wireless modem and room-sized LCD TV (see *Wired*, December).
What is a retail shop guy supposed to tell the customer who asks if he really needs to buy a $200 release binding to go on his 105 cm ski? Forget the customer, for a minute. We’re confusing each other. And just when the trial lawyers have discovered snowboard bindings, too. Why are we doing this? Is it because we think we can seduce snowboarders onto skis if we build the gear crude enough for them?
Why do we play these games? It’s because every factory, every retailer and every ski area in the country wants to monopolize its own niche market, however small. The most egregious example over the decades has been the soft slalom ski. Any competent engineer can build a nice even-flexing soft slalom ski. The marketing guys then sell it at nine different price points, with nine different paint jobs, as a women’s ski, a mogul ski, an advanced-intermediate ski, a NASTAR ski, a junior race ski, a high-end SMU and three different kinds of telemark ski (for racing, cruising and a little backcountry, of course).
One set of molds. What price do you want? I can name nine different companies that have done this. We’ve played confusing name games with powder skis (Widebodies? Midfats? Hey, the Head Yahoo was a midfat in 1971!), ski school programs (GLM, Perfect Turn, ATM, ATS, Natural Easy Carve), chairlifts, ticket pricing, snowmaking, trail counts, skiable acreage and reported snow conditions.
The name games will forever be with us. To avoid going absolutely nuts, we need to call our products by simple English-language names. I’m going to suggest this list of standard terms (in all cases, the KISS rule applies):
1) Terrain park. It’s not a snowboard park or a garden or an airpark. A terrain park will accommodate any kind of steerable sliding device.
2) Short ski. If it’s shorter than 150 cm, that’s all it is.
3) High-speed lift. Not Express, not Detachable, not Excelerator.
4) Carving ski. That’s what it’s for and that’s what it should help you do.
5) Ice. It’s not frozen granular, guys.
*Seth Masia works for Microsoft, a name that has somehow become synonymous with size and power. Reach him at [email protected].*
