The first two Salomon transformations brought product design maturity to the binding business. They were based on some clever customer-centered thinking, and produced genuine improvements in convenience and performance:
The 727 alpine binding series (1978) combined the hands-free step-in heel, the retractable ski brake and a cleverly leveraged single-pivot toe unit in a package so appealingly robust that its user interface became industry standard.
The SNS cross-country system made obsolete forever the efficient but crude 75mm and 50mm Nordic Norm standards, at least for racing and light touring skis. And it killed off the handmade goat- or kangaroo-skin “Donald Duck” racing shoe, because it required an injection-molded sole.
The second two Salomon transformations were presented to skiers as dramatic steps forward in product design, but in fact they were merely more efficient to produce than traditional shapes.
The rear-entry boot was only modestly successful when introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Heschung, Hanson, Franet/Scott and Olin. But when Salomon introduced the stovepipe SX90, the market thought the concept was really cool, and the boot industry stampeded to imitate the design. I remember asking Salomon’s Roger Pirot how the SX was an improvement, in any way, over the equally clumsy but softer-flexing Olin boot; he sniffed and said, “You are comparing a Mercedes to a Volkswagen!” Of course, assembly of the SX and its successors was largely automated: the boot contained not a single hand-stitched seam and none of the plastic bits was complex enough in shape to require being pried out of a mold. Like the bindings, it could be screwed together by robots. It was by no stretch of the imagination an improvement in fit and performance over products like the Nordica GP, Lange Banshee, Caber Alpha or Sanmarco AXi.
The cap ski was, from the start, simply a way to print graphics on a flat sheet of plastic, for use as the ski’s topskin—it was a bit cheaper to do it that way than to silkscreen finished skis. Elan and Volant introduced cap skis at about the same time, but it was Salomon’s product, sold fraudulently as a “monocoque” structure, that seemed cool. The skis worked beautifully because Salomon had spent a great deal of money to imitate Volkl’s level of base and edge finish. But every other factory stampeded to build new molds and presses to imitate the tops of Salomon cap skis, not the bottoms.
For a couple of years, panicked ski marketers even pushed “opticaps”—flat skis ground smooth around the top edges to resemble Salomon’s “monocoque.” Of course, anyone who cared enough to saw through a Salomon ski found a perfectly sound laminate or torsion box structure underneath the thin polypropylene cosmetic cover.
In both cases, many factories went bankrupt trying to follow Salomon’s lead—in spite of the fact that the resulting products offered no performance improvement over traditional designs. Perhaps the ski and boot industries needed to consolidate; God knows they were building a generic product. But needless panic certainly accelerated the process.
One result today is limited choice. Can you buy a Spalding (Persenico) ski today or a Kästle? How about a French-built Dynamic or a Lacroix? What about Yamaha or Authier? Where’s the Kastinger boot or the Trappeur? These were all good products, done in by managers who thought they had to compete toe-to-toe (as it were) with the Salomon marketing juggernaut. The following very fine companies changed ownership in part because they couldn’t match Salomon’s marketing muscle: Völkl, Caber (became Rossignol boots), Geze (became Rossignol bindings), Atomic, Blizzard, Sanmarco, Head, Koflach, Humanic/Dynafit, Raichle, Kneissl, Dachstein, Look, Olin—and on and on. A number of these brands will disappear over the next year or two.
What would have been a more rational way to respond to Salomon’s boot and ski entries? In retrospect, the established factories should have introduced rear-entry boots and cap skis at the bottom of the market, casting the designs for what they really were: cheaper ways to produce the goods. This is where “volume fit” boots wound up anyway. In hindsight, if the Austrian factories had held off a couple of years on the cap ski expenditures, they would have been able to roar back with shaped skis—and survived.
Today, Salomon looks rather like the Microsoft of snow sports. Like Microsoft, Salomon was a very well-managed company competing with a lot of very badly-managed companies. Rossignol is also well-managed, in a more conservative manner (call it the IBM of snow sports).
Even well-managed companies stumble from time to time. Salomon missed a couple of calls along the way:
Marker beat them up with the adjustable-stiffness Selective Control binding system. Salomon responded with the poorly-planned and over-engineered ProPulse binding.
Kneissl and Elan started the shaped-ski revolution, with a little push from the fatboy concept coming out of the Atomic plant. But southeastern Europe was beneath the Salomon radar screen and the folks at Salomon didn’t get it. Skis are every bit as important a performance leap as plastic boots and release bindings were, and they should have swept the market overnight. That it took three years was due very largely to the financial exhaustion of most ski factories after spending 5 to 10 percent of their gross over two years to build cap ski molds and presses. They simply hadn’t the resources to make another quick conversion. Even with that grace period, Salomon balked. As late as 1996, the company’s marketers were explaining, to anyone who would listen, that shapes would prove to be a passing fad.
With this history in mind, how are we to interpret the “revolutionary” Pilot System? Here we have a ski and binding designed to work uniquely together, outside the industry-wide standards for ski/binding mounting practices. The consumer sell is that “floating” the binding above the ski allows the ski to flex freely. We’ve heard this before from ESS (VAR system) and Tyrolia (FreeFlex). If skis actually worked better when soft, we’d all keep our Marker SCs set on 1 all the time. In fact, a stiff plate underfoot improves edge grip and stability. Salomon itself recently sold that idea with the ProPulse and the Derbyflex.
It’s been noted that attaching the binding to the ski with a couple of skewers has the potential to eliminate shop labor. That could improve a retailer’s bottom line; it could also help Salomon set up for direct-to-consumer sales.
My take: For a variety of reasons, Salomon is currently not profitable. Blame the lack of growth in skiing, the utter collapse of the in-line skate business, the final consolidation of the snowboard business and the leveling off of high-tech golf sales. There are no new storefronts to open; profit growth must now come through improvement in retained margin. This could come at the expense of businesses further down the distribution ladder or by guaranteeing that a larger proportion of consumers buy the ski and the binding together. Salomon is probably banking on both.
Imagine what the camera business would be today if you needed a certified mechanic to mount the lens to the SLR body. Nikon could be forced, in the shop, to work with Canon lenses. But because you can juggle the elements in your camera bag all by yourself, you’re free to use any Nikon lens on your Nikon, and any Canon lens on your Canon. And you can buy any of it by mail. Are we heading that way? The bicycle market has already done so.
The Pilot system may be a fine product. It’s certainly an eye-catcher. But its sole purpose is not to improve the flex pattern of the ski.
