Who
Jackson Hogen
Date Recorded
Oct. 22, 2026
The take up top
On Monday, Vail Resorts issued a note to investors encouraging them to vote against the slate of board nominees endorsed by Oasis Capital, which is attempting to seize control of the company. I mostly cite Town Lift’s article on the note in my analysis.
Why I interviewed him
Jackson has been rooted in the worlds of ski manufacturing, distribution, sales, and testing for decades. For many years, he ran Real Skiers, a website that offered bespoke expert ski advice. While he’s stepped away from the site, he remains dialed into how the forces of e-commerce, private equity, and ski media disintegration have, separately but simultaneously, irretrievably transformed an analogue world of precision tools into an online bazaar of click-my-affiliate-link guesswork reviews. It’s disheartening, but perhaps not catastrophic – select legacy ski companies continue to improve their products, specialty shops remain equipped with staff that can appropriately match equipment to your profile, and objective ratings – while difficult to pinpoint in the five-star-these-very-good crapstorm of Amazon rando rankings – do exist. Where? We discuss.
Transcripts
There are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.
Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.
Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.
Zoom
Stuart Winchester: My guest today is a ski industry insider going back decades. He was the editor of realskiers.com, which offered expert ski gear advice. His decades-long ski industry career includes stints as a ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, retail salesman, risk management lecturer.
00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:16.000
Stuart Winchester: Ski instructor and extreme camp ski coach, marketing director, resort feature writer, television host, screenwriter, and author of the excellent book Snowbird Secrets, which is about snowbird, but also will teach you how to ski. He is a very good friend of the storm. He is the pontiff of powder. He is Jackson Hogan.
00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:21.000
Stuart Winchester: Jackson, welcome back to The Storm. Long overdue. How you doing today, Jackson?
00:22:18.000 --> 00:22:19.000
Jackson Hogen: Oh.
00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:37.000
Jackson Hogen: So good to see you, Stu. Well, at this age, every day is a little different. The aging process, as many people have noted, is not for pussies, and it has certainly been a challenging year in that regard. But I’m skiing, I’m golfing, I’m doing exactly what I want to do.
00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:30.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:22:37.000 --> 00:22:53.000
Jackson Hogen: I may not be doing it as well as I used to, but I’m still in the game. So that’s all I can ask for. And I’ve got a lot of great friends to go skiing with. So, you know, skiing is, I’ve tried to take care of skiing all my life and now it’s time for skiing to take care of me and we’ll see how that goes.
00:22:53.000 --> 00:23:06.000
Stuart Winchester: Well, one of the changes in the past year, as I mentioned in the intro, was that you dispensed with your responsibility for real skiers, so just… I guess first reflect on…
00:23:06.000 --> 00:23:08.000
Stuart Winchester: what you…
00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:12.000
Stuart Winchester: hope your legacy is with Real Skiers, and then what you did with it.
00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:14.000
Stuart Winchester: In the end.
00:23:13.000 --> 00:23:20.000
Jackson Hogen: Sure. Who knows what one’s legacy will be? What I tried to do.
00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:36.000
Jackson Hogen: was do the best job I could imagine doing to try to give people accurate ski buying advice. Turns out, over the long run, that’s a very expensive proposition. It takes a ton of effort and time, because you have to corral ski testers, cajole them, you know, they have to have a.
00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:50.000
Jackson Hogen: methodology that’s easy to communicate, you have to have test cards that are both digital and paper. Digital turned out to be a disaster, because whatever software outfit was building my little interface.
00:23:50.000 --> 00:24:06.000
Jackson Hogen: Would invariably fail the night before the first big ski ski event, so it was, it was fraught with challenges left, right, and center, but in the end, the reason I attracted the audience I did get was they, they knew that I was.
00:24:06.000 --> 00:24:08.000
Jackson Hogen: Trying…
00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:13.000
Jackson Hogen: As hard as humanly possible to get them an unbiased, clean look.
00:24:13.000 --> 00:24:28.000
Jackson Hogen: at the principal ski market. In other words, I already told people, I don’t care that you go backcountry skiing. Yes, it’s great, bravo, I don’t cover that. I cover lift service terrain that real people go pay real money to go ski, and they want to get the most from that experience.
00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:42.000
Jackson Hogen: And they could be female testers, so I had to try to get female testers. I remember hauling all my women’s ski up to Squaw and putting it in a rental space so that the female instructors at Squaw could go and ski on them.
00:24:42.000 --> 00:24:46.000
Jackson Hogen: I worked literally every single day to try to get.
00:24:46.000 --> 00:24:49.000
Jackson Hogen: The best result, as, as…
00:24:49.000 --> 00:24:56.000
Jackson Hogen: as grounded in a real world process as possible.
00:24:56.000 --> 00:24:58.000
Jackson Hogen: So…
00:24:58.000 --> 00:25:13.000
Jackson Hogen: I kept my audience because I kept that promise, to constantly try to do my very best, although as things wound down, that became increasingly difficult. This… the substructure of the whole ski market collapsed.
00:25:13.000 --> 00:25:14.000
Jackson Hogen: Um…
00:25:14.000 --> 00:25:30.000
Jackson Hogen: The dirty little secret of everybody’s ski test going back decades is that it is paid for. You don’t just show up with your skis and say, here, I want you to test these. You show up with your skis and a check to go test these.
00:25:30.000 --> 00:25:32.000
Stuart Winchester: For the… a check for the ski area?
00:25:31.000 --> 00:25:45.000
Jackson Hogen: No, no, for the testing entity, for a ski magazine, for skiing magazines, for anybody who’s running a ski test outside, you know, there’s a bill attached with getting your skis into that ski test.
00:25:33.000 --> 00:25:35.000
Stuart Winchester: Testers.
00:25:35.000 --> 00:25:37.000
Stuart Winchester: Testing. Okay.
00:25:44.000 --> 00:25:49.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay, so the manufacturers were paying ski, skiing, etc.
00:25:48.000 --> 00:26:08.000
Jackson Hogen: Yeah, and I knew that. I didn’t start out where they ended up in terms of… I didn’t have the clout to just say, well, $77,000 and you’re in. I started at very modest fees, but built it up based on readership, and based on the fact that, yeah, this thing has traction, and it’s real, and it has value.
00:25:49.000 --> 00:25:50.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:26:08.000 --> 00:26:11.000
Jackson Hogen: But, this is the big but.
00:26:11.000 --> 00:26:36.000
Jackson Hogen: The ski industry went into a sort of, well, not sort of a tailspin. It was a genuine tailspin. And it’s been in it, at least at the retail level, for at least five, six years. And at the wholesaler level, what that has meant is each one of those five years began with optimism and said, we’re going to be up 20%. No one ever kept their job by going to the boss’s office and saying, hey, we’ll only be down 20% this year. That’s not a winning proposition. So everyone.
00:26:33.000 --> 00:26:34.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.
00:26:36.000 --> 00:26:42.000
Jackson Hogen: submits a budget to the parent company and to the boss, saying, this is what I think we’re going to spend.
00:26:42.000 --> 00:26:49.000
Jackson Hogen: On the marketing page, I was down near the bottom of that budget. I wasn’t at the top. There were other priorities ahead of me, darn.
00:26:47.000 --> 00:26:48.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:26:49.000 --> 00:27:00.000
Jackson Hogen: So when they… when they suddenly realized that for the second year in a row, third year in a row, fourth year in a row, fifth year in a row, they blew their forecast by Pollyanna numbers, which are never gonna meet.
00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:10.000
Jackson Hogen: And you… where do you start your cuts? Well, you don’t start it at the top, you start your cuts at the bottom. So, myself and anyone like myself.
00:27:10.000 --> 00:27:22.000
Jackson Hogen: went to the cutting room floor, um, starting about, I don’t know, 4 years ago, making it, you know, financially less feasible to continue. I shouldered on for as long as I could.
00:27:22.000 --> 00:27:30.000
Jackson Hogen: Until there was, as Gertrude Stein might have said, there was no there there.
00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:41.000
Jackson Hogen: looked around for, what should I do? Should I try to sell it? Well, there’s really not a buyer’s market for it, when they sort of say, well, how am I going to continue to make money, Jackson?
00:27:41.000 --> 00:27:51.000
Jackson Hogen: Beats me. Good luck. Pat on the back. So no, all dressed up and no place to go. And so I said, well.
00:27:51.000 --> 00:28:08.000
Jackson Hogen: Let’s just give it away. Let’s not worry about whether I can get five grand or 50 grand or anything else. Let’s just give it to someone else who gives a shit. And in my opinion, present company are the are two of the journalists left in skiing and I.
00:28:08.000 --> 00:28:11.000
Jackson Hogen: Gave real skiers to the one other guy who.
00:28:11.000 --> 00:28:26.000
Jackson Hogen: is worthy of that title, uh, Seth Masia. And Seth agreed that Skiing History would take over Real Skiers. They… they are now the… my… my bill for my server now goes to them, all that sort of stuff. Um…
00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:41.000
Jackson Hogen: the… I tried as hard as I could to re… refund people who were getting billed at the same time that I was opening the site to everyone. Real Skiers is now… it never went offline, it’s still there, even though it’s, like, people trying to hack it, all kinds of crap has gone on behind the screen.
00:28:37.000 --> 00:28:38.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:28:41.000 --> 00:28:59.000
Jackson Hogen: But it’s… it’s still there, it’s still viable, um, it consists of, gosh, 165 podcasts, I think over 330 essays, all of which I read again. Not a… there’s… I’m sorry to say, if people are looking for… for dirt, there’s not a lie in it, I didn’t miss a trend, I didn’t…
00:28:59.000 --> 00:29:15.000
Jackson Hogen: you know, characterize anything in a way that turned out not to be true. Um, so I still feel that a great deal of the content… sure, the annual ski reviews, you’re only interested in if you go to a ski swap, and you found this older version of XYZ, and you want to read something about it.
00:29:15.000 --> 00:29:21.000
Jackson Hogen: But there’s a lot more content to Real Skiers than just the ski reviews.
00:29:21.000 --> 00:29:32.000
Jackson Hogen: that is now up for… the contract calls for skiing history to keep it up for 5 years. Um, at that point in time, if there’s absolutely no activity, then they’ll probably let it slip beneath the waves.
00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:49.000
Jackson Hogen: But the hope is that they can use it as a vehicle to expand their portfolio and help it for fundraising. And I couldn’t think of a better custodian for what I’ve done. So it’s it’s out there in all of its essence, including thousands of ski reviews.
00:29:49.000 --> 00:30:04.000
Jackson Hogen: But it’s the other stuff that turned out to be timeless. When I proposed to Peter Kelty, who founded Real Skiers many years ago, and who he and I worked together for a couple of years in transition, and I said, I think I should do a weekly newsletter.
00:30:04.000 --> 00:30:13.000
Jackson Hogen: You know, free, so that people won’t have a barrier to seeing it. And he haughtily told me that you’ll run out of ideas in a month.
00:30:13.000 --> 00:30:24.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, 330 revelations later, ha ha ha, that was absolutely untrue. There was always a need. And that allowed me, gave me a platform.
00:30:19.000 --> 00:30:20.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:30:24.000 --> 00:30:27.000
Jackson Hogen: whereby I could analyze anything I chose to, so…
00:30:27.000 --> 00:30:31.000
Jackson Hogen: you know, I indulged myself, but it’s also…
00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:38.000
Jackson Hogen: Because people wanted to know the man behind the myth, if you will, I wrote a series called The Making of a Skier about my lifetime on skis.
00:30:38.000 --> 00:30:48.000
Jackson Hogen: which ultimately ends up getting very personal about my family, so that, again, my humanism, to such a degree that I have it, is on the table as well.
00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:50.000
Jackson Hogen: And…
00:30:50.000 --> 00:31:00.000
Jackson Hogen: I… the podcasts are… I mean, I… everything I tried to do, I tried to do as well as I could on my shoestring budget. So I never…
00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:15.000
Jackson Hogen: I never tried to come short on quality, and I never said I can’t do that because I don’t have the time. I just make the time to try to do the best you can. And I think it’s still a valid tool, especially considering that all the rest of so-called ski journalism has just cratered.
00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:22.000
Jackson Hogen: I mean, we have more bad actors in trade right now than we have good ones, so…
00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:18.000
Stuart Winchester: So with with.
00:31:21.000 --> 00:31:27.000
Stuart Winchester: So as I want to go back to that point you made about there’s a tier.
00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:32.000
Stuart Winchester: That the ski companies have, where they’ll pay for…
00:31:32.000 --> 00:31:43.000
Stuart Winchester: testing, and you were at the bottom, so there must have still been people above you, even though the legacy magazines have gone away. So, from your point of view.
00:31:44.000 --> 00:31:48.000
Stuart Winchester: Well, who’s left, first of all, do you know? And from your point of view.
00:31:48.000 --> 00:32:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Is there any trustworthy source online for ski reviews? Everybody keeps pointing me to Blister, I haven’t been deep into the site yet, but please lay out what you can for us.
00:31:57.000 --> 00:31:59.000
Jackson Hogen: What?
00:32:01.000 --> 00:32:20.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, I think Blister’s a good place to start, because I think they are also extremely conscientious, uh, whip-smart. Uh, last I heard, it was $7,000 to get reviewed by them. It’s… if it’s… if they’re still doing that, I’m sure they’re probably asking for more. Um…
00:32:08.000 --> 00:32:09.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:32:18.000 --> 00:32:20.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:32:20.000 --> 00:32:38.000
Jackson Hogen: And, uh, they do a very, very different methodology, which I disagree strongly with, but… but it is conscientious, and it’s not unconscious, they’re not doing it because it’s the cheap way to do it, or the stupid way to do it, and maybe that’s not even the way they do it anymore, but they used to send.
00:32:26.000 --> 00:32:27.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:32:38.000 --> 00:32:53.000
Jackson Hogen: the article under… in question, Ski XYZ, off to Ski Tester, who could be God knows anywhere, you know, he could be in New Zealand, and, you know, they spared no expense getting it to that person, and they kept it, and they kept doing it, um…
00:32:54.000 --> 00:33:01.000
Jackson Hogen: in this, you know, one person lives with the product till they really get to know it, that’s almost antithetical.
00:33:01.000 --> 00:33:04.000
Jackson Hogen: to the way I was taught up to do a ski test.
00:33:04.000 --> 00:33:05.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:33:04.000 --> 00:33:07.000
Jackson Hogen: Um, the…
00:33:08.000 --> 00:33:10.000
Jackson Hogen: The objective…
00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:30.000
Jackson Hogen: is to be as fresh as you can, get as fresh an image as you can, and then go and collect the next image of the comparable ski in the same category and try to get those events up back to back to back to back to back. The more you live with the product, the more you’re going to like it, the more you’re going to find out and you’re like, oh, well, this was great in the slush.
00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:21.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:33:30.000 --> 00:33:41.000
Jackson Hogen: who the hell cares? I just think it’s… I think it’s asking… in this particular instance, it’s asking the wrong questions. And maybe they’re asking different questions now, because frankly, I’ve lost interest in looking at people that.
00:33:41.000 --> 00:33:45.000
Jackson Hogen: Used to be perceived as competitors.
00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:56.000
Jackson Hogen: I mean, outside’s effort is a pale, pale substitute for what they used to do, and I know what they used to do very, very well, because I ski tested for about 20 years for a ski magazine.
00:33:55.000 --> 00:34:05.000
Stuart Winchester: So take us into that. What was it like, and what is it like now? And I’m assuming you have sources inside who are still doing it, or is your perception just from reading it?
00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:09.000
Jackson Hogen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, well, it’s gone from an exercise that took.
00:34:09.000 --> 00:34:12.000
Jackson Hogen: Five days of intensive.
00:34:12.000 --> 00:34:22.000
Jackson Hogen: skiing your little heart out wherever we were, sometimes as many as 25 skis a day, which is too much. I don’t care where you are or who you are.
00:34:13.000 --> 00:34:15.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:34:19.000 --> 00:34:21.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:34:21.000 --> 00:34:25.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, it’s hard to get 25 runs in a day, let alone changing skis.
00:34:23.000 --> 00:34:34.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, but it’s a one-run, one-ski. I mean, you’ve got to… you can’t indulge it and say, I just need one more run. No, you don’t. I need your skis. Get off them and get, you know, shut up and.
00:34:25.000 --> 00:34:26.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:34:29.000 --> 00:34:30.000
Stuart Winchester: Yes.
00:34:33.000 --> 00:34:34.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:34:34.000 --> 00:34:51.000
Jackson Hogen: It had an incredible test crew. I mean, unimpeachable in its breadth and quality. Um, that’s gone. I mean, I think there’s still some legacies from that. I mean, Todd Kelly, I think, is still doing it, because they’ve been great guys. Rogan may still be doing it, because he’s one of the absolute.
00:34:45.000 --> 00:34:47.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:34:51.000 --> 00:35:00.000
Jackson Hogen: princes of our sport. I can’t tell you, I don’t have enough good words for Mike Rogan. Um, but he alone cannot make up a test, and they’ve gone from.
00:34:52.000 --> 00:34:54.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:35:00.000 --> 00:35:10.000
Jackson Hogen: basically owning the Vail Valley for a week for skis and a week for voots, with an armada of dedicated testers, all of whom had enviable resumes.
00:35:10.000 --> 00:35:27.000
Jackson Hogen: to a small crowd at the top of Mount Rose instead of someplace else, and two days of whatever weather they’ve got, and in two days, they go through whatever bundle they’ve got, and I didn’t look further under the hood, nor do I try to step in and bug people when they’re trying to do their job, it’s just…
00:35:26.000 --> 00:35:27.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:35:27.000 --> 00:35:42.000
Jackson Hogen: Observationally, much smaller cast, vastly reduced amount of time on the snow, and appropriate plunge and prestige. I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I’ve never had a reader saying, boy, I’m really interested in what they’ve got to say over there.
00:35:42.000 --> 00:35:43.000
Jackson Hogen: Oh.
00:35:44.000 --> 00:35:46.000
Stuart Winchester: OK, so OK, so it.
00:35:44.000 --> 00:35:45.000
Jackson Hogen: Ever.
00:35:46.000 --> 00:35:51.000
Stuart Winchester: If there’s a dearth of good sources for…
00:35:51.000 --> 00:36:00.000
Stuart Winchester: Trusted Ski Reviews. You’re still involved, I believe you still fit boots at your local ski shop. Is the best route.
00:35:56.000 --> 00:35:57.000
Jackson Hogen: Yes.
00:36:00.000 --> 00:36:04.000
Stuart Winchester: To go demo stuff for skiers and actually try it?
00:36:05.000 --> 00:36:21.000
Jackson Hogen: why not? I mean, the industry does make that possible. Um, I know the mega resorts were trying to make it so you had a one-time sign-up fee, and then you remember, and you could go into their infinite, you know, number of skis. I mean, almost too much to have to deal with, the amount of stuff that they.
00:36:08.000 --> 00:36:09.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:36:21.000 --> 00:36:27.000
Jackson Hogen: that they’ve dragged, put into the tests that they do. Um, but I think, um.
00:36:28.000 --> 00:36:36.000
Jackson Hogen: you’re… most people aren’t very good ski testers, in part because they’re just not good enough skiers. They don’t…
00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:42.000
Jackson Hogen: They have a hard time differentiating between their bad day and the ski’s bad day.
00:36:40.000 --> 00:36:41.000
Stuart Winchester: No.
00:36:42.000 --> 00:36:47.000
Jackson Hogen: And there is definitely a discipline to it.
00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:49.000
Jackson Hogen: I just think…
00:36:49.000 --> 00:36:56.000
Jackson Hogen: there is, right now, you’re your own best bet. Read, sure, read stuff, I mean, um…
00:36:53.000 --> 00:36:54.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:36:56.000 --> 00:37:11.000
Jackson Hogen: Ski Essentials has a good reputation for at least reporting on skis. I’ve had an opportunity to watch those guys in action when we were at group events where more than one journalist was brought in to ski a brand’s new stuff.
00:37:11.000 --> 00:37:24.000
Jackson Hogen: And very impressive skier, um, and an amazing photographer, right, right on his tail, flying down the mountain, because they’re very good skiers, not poking his way down the hill. But it’s, it’s interesting when you watch.
00:37:24.000 --> 00:37:42.000
Jackson Hogen: a really good skier ski test, every ski looks exactly the same. I don’t know what they get from the video part, because I gleaned absolutely zero. Every run, he looked… because he’s a great skier, he made every ski look the same, and I don’t know… I’m sure his feedback was different, because, you know, you’re getting different sensations coming in.
00:37:42.000 --> 00:37:43.000
Jackson Hogen: But…
00:37:43.000 --> 00:37:52.000
Jackson Hogen: again, how are they capturing, really capturing the data? On the other hand, I think they’ve, based on all the feedback I hear, they do a great job of.
00:37:52.000 --> 00:37:57.000
Jackson Hogen: Putting information out there, however they gather it, and however they wait.
00:37:57.000 --> 00:38:00.000
Jackson Hogen: whatever results they’re putting into their system.
00:38:00.000 --> 00:38:14.000
Jackson Hogen: they see everything, as near as I can tell. They’re as ecumenical as they can be in terms of what’s available in the North American market, and they try to provide that feedback information as many ways as they can, and I think at the…
00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:20.000
Jackson Hogen: And the the bottom feeder market where the you know where everybody lives who’s.
00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:32.000
Jackson Hogen: potential predator on the skiing public. I think they have a high standard, and I think they’re trying to do the best job they can. Some people have no standards and have never tried to do anything well, as near as I can.
00:38:31.000 --> 00:38:39.000
Stuart Winchester: Are there any particularly egregious places that you would avoid sources that you think are just AI?
00:38:39.000 --> 00:38:41.000
Stuart Winchester: Funneling things in.
00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:50.000
Jackson Hogen: I don’t… I… first of all, we’re too small a community to sort of picket each other too much. I think if you’re trying to do it, presumably you’re trying to do it for some reason, um…
00:38:50.000 --> 00:38:52.000
Jackson Hogen: But I would say.
00:38:53.000 --> 00:38:55.000
Jackson Hogen: Do it yourself.
00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:56.000
Jackson Hogen: But…
00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:08.000
Jackson Hogen: be realistic. If you have 3 skis you want to do, you have to try to do them back-to-back-to-back on the same day, ideally. You have to try to minimize the amount of variables that you’re throwing into your own process, and…
00:39:01.000 --> 00:39:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:39:09.000 --> 00:39:11.000
Jackson Hogen: If you do that.
00:39:11.000 --> 00:39:14.000
Jackson Hogen: You’ll get a result that’s right for you.
00:39:14.000 --> 00:39:29.000
Jackson Hogen: And that’s about all you can hope to do. To ski everything that’s available in a given genre is a Herculean task, and you’ll get lost, I would think, before you get to the end of it.
00:39:27.000 --> 00:39:28.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:39:29.000 --> 00:39:48.000
Jackson Hogen: So which brands have you had success with in the past? You can stay with those. Key personalities don’t change much. Head designers have not changed, not at head, but the lead designer hasn’t changed very much from place to place to place. So the ethos of a brand doesn’t change much. Now.
00:39:30.000 --> 00:39:31.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.
00:39:39.000 --> 00:39:40.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:39:48.000 --> 00:39:55.000
Jackson Hogen: How that brand goes to market has to be fed into a distribution machine, which can really warp.
00:39:55.000 --> 00:39:57.000
Jackson Hogen: Um…
00:39:57.000 --> 00:40:02.000
Jackson Hogen: the the brand in the sense that well let’s look let’s look ahead to this coming season.
00:40:02.000 --> 00:40:17.000
Jackson Hogen: Prices got up, tariffs got charged, brands tried to swallow as much of the increases that were thrown their way as they possibly could to the point of not to mention all the business plans they had to redo every time Mr. Knucklehead changed the tariff rate.
00:40:18.000 --> 00:40:24.000
Jackson Hogen: wouldn’t hurt to have sensible leadership in the country overall, which we certainly are lacking. Um, but…
00:40:24.000 --> 00:40:26.000
Jackson Hogen: The…
00:40:26.000 --> 00:40:29.000
Jackson Hogen: The end of the day for the to get back to the original question.
00:40:29.000 --> 00:40:34.000
Jackson Hogen: Narrow your field down to three reasonable alternatives.
00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:42.000
Jackson Hogen: Go ski your little heart out on them. One will be better than the other. But realize that whatever ski you get.
00:40:42.000 --> 00:40:57.000
Jackson Hogen: will more than likely not be well tuned. There are exceptions to this, but they are rare, can be mentioned very quickly. You learned how to personalize your base grind, if you can, because that will open up the envelope of performance of whatever ski you end up on.
00:40:57.000 --> 00:41:03.000
Jackson Hogen: So, for example, suppose you decide that you want to get a vocal Mantra M7.
00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:07.000
Jackson Hogen: Great, terrific all-mountain ski, very much one of the best ever made.
00:41:07.000 --> 00:41:16.000
Jackson Hogen: But it’s still a heavy ski, demands to be skiing strong and fast, and the tendency is to try to make it optimize its carving experience.
00:41:16.000 --> 00:41:27.000
Jackson Hogen: But what do you do in bumps, then? How do you take that and then make it optimized for bumps? I’ll tell you how to do it. You optimize it with your base grind, and you create something like my footprint that I like.
00:41:27.000 --> 00:41:43.000
Jackson Hogen: is actually called a thumbprint, which one I’ve elongated. And then my tutor and I have worked on how fine and how wide the the band of the ski that the grinder doesn’t get because it’s outside the it’s the swath.
00:41:43.000 --> 00:42:05.000
Jackson Hogen: That is cutting on the ski, how you treat that little narrow area. Why did I obsess about that? Because if I’m free skiing and I suddenly come around the corner and it’s all bumps, whoopee, well, I don’t stop. So line it up and get going. But you can’t ski a mogul field the same way you ski a groomed run. That ain’t gonna work.
00:42:05.000 --> 00:42:09.000
Jackson Hogen: So, when you’re in those narrow confines, the troughs.
00:42:09.000 --> 00:42:17.000
Jackson Hogen: You need to… you don’t have time to wait for the ski to catch up in the tip, and then you wait it in the middle, and you’re gonna then ride out the tail. That does not happen.
00:42:17.000 --> 00:42:35.000
Jackson Hogen: You gotta get on and off that ski as quickly as you can, because the next little surprise is coming up fast. And you have to be able to push the ski across the fall line. Not far, because you’re only going maybe a foot with it, but you can’t have resistance at that point in time, because it’s gotta happen, and it’s gotta happen right now.
00:42:32.000 --> 00:42:34.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:42:35.000 --> 00:42:51.000
Jackson Hogen: So I’m trying to increase the lateral lubricity of the ski. It’s not the objective of the race guide. It’s the objective only of a free skier who says, I want to be able to take it in all terrain and have the ski absolutely not care.
00:42:51.000 --> 00:42:54.000
Jackson Hogen: that I’ve taken it in to all terrain.
00:42:52.000 --> 00:42:53.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:42:54.000 --> 00:42:55.000
Jackson Hogen: So…
00:42:55.000 --> 00:43:05.000
Stuart Winchester: So how do we… how do we… that… that… that… it’s a good place to talk about the retail end of it, and shops. So… so I want… I want to ask, first of all, uh…
00:42:55.000 --> 00:42:57.000
Jackson Hogen: Base prep, I would say, is…
00:43:05.000 --> 00:43:07.000
Stuart Winchester: I I.
00:43:07.000 --> 00:43:15.000
Stuart Winchester: none of what you just said makes any sense to me, so how can I take my skis to a tech, which is… which is, I think, what you think most people should do.
00:43:14.000 --> 00:43:16.000
Jackson Hogen: Mm-hmm.
00:43:15.000 --> 00:43:19.000
Stuart Winchester: And what do I tell them? And what does that landscape?
00:43:19.000 --> 00:43:20.000
Jackson Hogen: Okay.
00:43:19.000 --> 00:43:27.000
Stuart Winchester: look like? You said particularly five years have been bad. I don’t know if that landscape scale… it’s a big question, but start small and go big, if you don’t mind.
00:43:26.000 --> 00:43:32.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, okay, for the shop to do that, they need the tool, and the tool costs a lot of money.
00:43:31.000 --> 00:43:33.000
Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm.
00:43:32.000 --> 00:43:51.000
Jackson Hogen: And I’m sure Wintersteiger isn’t the only one who’s got these capabilities, and her Montana note does, but I know the Wintersteiger Jupiter machine pretty well as a layman. And if the shop doesn’t have a tool with that degree of versatility, then you’re just talking and nothing’s gonna change.
00:43:50.000 --> 00:43:52.000
Stuart Winchester: And how much does that machine cost?
00:43:51.000 --> 00:43:52.000
Jackson Hogen: Okay.
00:43:52.000 --> 00:43:54.000
Jackson Hogen: Several hundred thousand dollars.
00:43:54.000 --> 00:44:15.000
Jackson Hogen: I don’t know what it is today. And if I if I underpriced them by $100,000, they’ll be angry. If I overpriced them, they’ll be upset as well. So but but it’s it’s a big chunk of change. But, it makes all the difference in the world, not only because there’s some manufacturers that are underfunded by the people that own them, so they don’t do much at the bottom of the ski.
00:44:02.000 --> 00:44:04.000
Stuart Winchester: Several works.
00:44:06.000 --> 00:44:07.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:44:15.000 --> 00:44:23.000
Jackson Hogen: right up to the companies that are well-known for how they’ll take care of the base of the ski. But that ability to.
00:44:23.000 --> 00:44:29.000
Jackson Hogen: personalize the Bonsono interface, um, is critical to.
00:44:29.000 --> 00:44:46.000
Jackson Hogen: the… the breadth of… that your ski has for you. In other words, well, today I’ll take my Mogul ski. Well, today I want… every day I want to take the ski that’ll handle all the conditions I’m likely to encounter that day. Um, and I’m kind of a ski junkie, so I probably have a little more than I absolutely need to have.
00:44:40.000 --> 00:44:41.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think so.
00:44:46.000 --> 00:44:48.000
Jackson Hogen: But, um…
00:44:48.000 --> 00:44:50.000
Jackson Hogen: I think…
00:44:50.000 --> 00:45:05.000
Jackson Hogen: I think you can have, you can, you can have a one ski quiver. It’s realistic to have that. And skis now, unless you mistreat them, will last a pretty long time. Yeah, they’ll, you know, and then you’ll turn around next day and you’ll ski a ski and it’ll break and they’ll say, Jackson, you told me they’d.
00:44:59.000 --> 00:45:00.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:45:05.000 --> 00:45:11.000
Jackson Hogen: last forever, and they still are, they can delaminate still, there’s things, bad things that can happen.
00:45:09.000 --> 00:45:11.000
Stuart Winchester: Maybe it’s the driver, not the car, right?
00:45:11.000 --> 00:45:15.000
Jackson Hogen: Yeah, I think bad things can happen to good skis.
00:45:13.000 --> 00:45:15.000
Stuart Winchester: Right.
00:45:15.000 --> 00:45:30.000
Jackson Hogen: But the more you really understand your ski and know it, the better you’ll ski it, and the more enjoyable it’ll be wherever you take it to ski. But I would suggest, given the fact that we’re in this world now, and have been for a long time, with these segmentations according to waist width.
00:45:23.000 --> 00:45:24.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:47.000
Jackson Hogen: A practice I began at Real Skiers about 15 years ago or so. Those delineations have not changed over the course of the last 15 years. So those boundaries, whether the manufacturers adopted me or I just did a good job of anticipating where the market could go.
00:45:47.000 --> 00:45:50.000
Jackson Hogen: But but those.
00:45:50.000 --> 00:45:56.000
Jackson Hogen: I’m doing this because on my test sheet, they’re all in a column, and the next column, and the next column.
00:45:53.000 --> 00:45:56.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, right, right.
00:45:57.000 --> 00:46:14.000
Jackson Hogen: the, uh… don’t just be in one column. If you’re… especially if you’re planning to travel and go west. If you’re in east, you should have a narrow ski. There’s no absolutely godforsaken reason you should be on a 106 underfoot. If you’re skiing mostly groomers in the east, you’re just… you’re making life a lot more difficult for yourself.
00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:10.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:16.000
Jackson Hogen: It will eventually…
00:46:17.000 --> 00:46:21.000
Jackson Hogen: affect your technique. You’ll ski worse.
00:46:19.000 --> 00:46:20.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:37.000
Jackson Hogen: Um, so make sure that you have a, a reasonably narrow ski. I would say anything below 90 is a reasonably narrow ski, 90 millimeters underfoot. Um, and then have something that you’re going to take down when Glorioski, you finally get a powder day. Um, and.
00:46:30.000 --> 00:46:31.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:46:37.000 --> 00:46:39.000
Jackson Hogen: But that is…
00:46:39.000 --> 00:46:54.000
Jackson Hogen: We all treasure those days. And if you’re on a wider ski, no question that’s easier. But remember, it still needs to be tuned. It still is going to have behavioral quirks that you can best address by taking the ski you got.
00:46:54.000 --> 00:46:55.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:46:54.000 --> 00:46:56.000
Jackson Hogen: And then tuning it appropriately.
00:46:56.000 --> 00:47:07.000
Stuart Winchester: So I’m trying to find your columns here, Jackson. I’m on realskiers.com, and people watching on YouTube at Storm Ski Journal on stormskiing.com can see this. How would I find your categories?
00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:09.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, let me — go to Gear Guide.
00:47:08.000 --> 00:47:10.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:47:09.000 --> 00:47:13.000
Jackson Hogen: And there’s Reid first.
00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:14.000
Stuart Winchester: Yep.
00:47:13.000 --> 00:47:16.000
Jackson Hogen: I would say is a good place to start.
00:47:16.000 --> 00:47:26.000
Jackson Hogen: Um, how to use our reviews? Sure, I mean, this is, this is the way the whole thing’s designed, is to walk you through this. Um, so start with, uh…
00:47:23.000 --> 00:47:24.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:47:26.000 --> 00:47:33.000
Jackson Hogen: Read first. I would go boom. I can’t influence your guy. You’ve got the controls.
00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:29.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah. Okay.
00:47:31.000 --> 00:47:38.000
Stuart Winchester: No, I’m just hitting, uh, ski review… I’m trying to find where you had the columns, because you said all your… yeah.
00:47:35.000 --> 00:47:50.000
Jackson Hogen: Oh, so you can see them. I’ve never put those in front of the skier. They don’t see that piece. That piece is not a piece that goes to the public. It’s what I use in order to… I’ve got one sitting on the top of my desk.
00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:41.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:47:41.000 --> 00:47:42.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:47:51.000 --> 00:48:05.000
Jackson Hogen: Um, my desk is markedly clear. Um, yeah, well, there’s… those are… don’t tell you the categories, but those… and that’s by… and that’s… yeah, I’m constantly sort of tinkering in those deals, but they’re… that’s fundamentally the…
00:47:52.000 --> 00:47:54.000
Stuart Winchester: Here’s a card.
00:47:57.000 --> 00:47:58.000
Stuart Winchester: Yes.
00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:11.000
Jackson Hogen: The same stuff. Those are the criteria that I’m testing the ski with.
00:48:06.000 --> 00:48:07.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:48:11.000 --> 00:48:20.000
Jackson Hogen: or that I have in my head. Um, and, uh, let’s see, here we are. Here are categories and ascending order of waste width. Oops, you’re just forgetting to do it. So, um…
00:48:12.000 --> 00:48:14.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:48:17.000 --> 00:48:19.000
Stuart Winchester: Oh, I see.
00:48:20.000 --> 00:48:23.000
Jackson Hogen: You’ve now moved into…
00:48:23.000 --> 00:48:26.000
Jackson Hogen: Um, it…
00:48:26.000 --> 00:48:41.000
Stuart Winchester: I’ll go to my favorite. So, I tend to be a Blizzard guy. I’m sure you pronounce it Blizzard, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve been on the Rustler 10s for years, anytime there’s new snow, and then I have, like, a 93… I don’t even know what it’s called. I think it.
00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:46.000
Stuart Winchester: that I use on other days, and I really like that as a quiver, but I ski…
00:48:46.000 --> 00:49:02.000
Stuart Winchester: at about 50 different places a year, and in all conditions, and I don’t chase powder, I just… hey, here’s my Midwest trip, it’s on these days. So that’s what I’ve settled into, and I just go with what I know, and they’re really good, responsive skis. But I might be being naive, I mean… I mean, J.
00:49:01.000 --> 00:49:11.000
Jackson Hogen: No, you’re not. I mean, that’s Blizzard. First of all, family owned makes a big, big difference. Technica Group, which owns Blizzard and Nordica, built in the same factory.
00:49:04.000 --> 00:49:05.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:49:06.000 --> 00:49:07.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:49:11.000 --> 00:49:24.000
Jackson Hogen: Um, have the same, uh, Stefano Montegazza, who came over from Voelkel many years ago to lead, uh, design and R&D there. He is a fabulous designer. Um, they…
00:49:16.000 --> 00:49:18.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:49:24.000 --> 00:49:40.000
Jackson Hogen: They’re very clever, as is vocal, I think, in how they take their innovations and push them through their line a little bit each year, so there’s always something brand new to talk about while maintaining a very rich.
00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:58.000
Jackson Hogen: construction. And I have, you know, hats off to everybody at Blitzard who I, I, I actually worked in quick anecdote. I worked in that factory for Scott. I was hired by Scott to develop their first line of alpine skis, and they were going to have them built in Mittersall.
00:49:51.000 --> 00:49:52.000
Stuart Winchester: Busy.
00:49:52.000 --> 00:49:53.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:49:56.000 --> 00:49:57.000
Stuart Winchester: Oh, wow.
00:49:58.000 --> 00:50:03.000
Jackson Hogen: So I went into that factory, um, before, um.
00:50:03.000 --> 00:50:18.000
Jackson Hogen: It got a huge influx of capital when it was purchased by the Technica group, and they basically took everything in the factory that I was had to work in and threw it away, which was a good choice and rebuilt it all from scratch.
00:50:15.000 --> 00:50:17.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:50:18.000 --> 00:50:34.000
Jackson Hogen: Because the factory that I walked into, every line, every single stage of production had a correction loop that had to go back through to be good enough to go to the next stage. That is, that’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. And they, uh…
00:50:25.000 --> 00:50:27.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:50:29.000 --> 00:50:30.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:50:34.000 --> 00:50:50.000
Jackson Hogen: Once the Technica group came in and started building, you know, according to a sane structure, they have very rich structures. They make the most of what they have. Some of it, of course, is a little bit of storytelling. You know, our women’s skis are all made by women for women. Well, that’s…
00:50:50.000 --> 00:51:06.000
Jackson Hogen: It’s as true as it’s ever likely to be. I mean, the head of design for everything at Elan is a woman, so there are women in charge of places, and there are women in charge in places of authority than just around Blizzard.
00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:13.000
Jackson Hogen: But Blizard blends their technical savvy with a very sharp eye to marketing.
00:51:13.000 --> 00:51:19.000
Jackson Hogen: So, uh, a Blazard Black Pearl, probably the most successful ski in the last 10 years.
00:51:19.000 --> 00:51:23.000
Jackson Hogen: In terms of number of units sold.
00:51:23.000 --> 00:51:44.000
Jackson Hogen: Is it entirely a made for women ski? Well, every ski they make in ski informs the next ski they make, no matter who they make it for. So it’s a little overdone in that respect. But they did have all women panels. Leslie Baker Brown, who fueled the whole thing from the top, does a fantastic job. I have 0 negative things to say about.
00:51:30.000 --> 00:51:32.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:51:44.000 --> 00:52:03.000
Jackson Hogen: Leslie and her team. But is there a certain amount of marketing hoo-ha involved? Sure, because they’re not going to build all new everything for something which may be no more than a third of their total market sales. You keep as much as you can, and then you figure out, okay, how do I optimize the pieces that I’ve got.
00:51:55.000 --> 00:51:56.000
Stuart Winchester: Yum.
00:52:03.000 --> 00:52:09.000
Jackson Hogen: to meet the intrinsic needs of that audience. And I think Blizzard has done a good job of that, as anybody in the market.
00:52:08.000 --> 00:52:24.000
Stuart Winchester: All right, so you have Blizzard, and they’ve done a good job. And if you go — for the folks watching my screen, OK, there’s a bunch of brands you can choose from in the dropdown. Atomic, Blizzard, Fisher, Head, Castle, Liberty, Nordica, Rosinul, Solomon.
00:52:15.000 --> 00:52:16.000
Jackson Hogen: Go ahead.
00:52:24.000 --> 00:52:39.000
Stuart Winchester: Stokely and Vokely, I’m sure I pronounced half those wrong. Anyway, so it sounds like Bazaar has kept their standards, still family-owned, but you also said there wouldn’t be a lot of optimism in this talk. It’s actually been more upbeat than I thought, but what’s been the fate of some of these legacy brands.
00:52:27.000 --> 00:52:28.000
Jackson Hogen: Thank you.
00:52:39.000 --> 00:52:54.000
Stuart Winchester: as it relates to private equity, and then the impact that’s had on quality? Because you said, for Bolzar, one generation informs the next, informs the next, but are there brands that have just thrown out everything, and they’re just tapping the name on and trying to.
00:52:43.000 --> 00:52:44.000
Jackson Hogen: Oh.
00:52:54.000 --> 00:53:00.000
Stuart Winchester: and, you know, minimize their R&D so they can just sell skis on name until it dies.
00:53:01.000 --> 00:53:07.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, you mentioned private equity, which is an absolute plague, and I’ve never… you could guarantee.
00:53:07.000 --> 00:53:09.000
Jackson Hogen: that they will…
00:53:09.000 --> 00:53:15.000
Jackson Hogen: Misunderstand the market they think they know down to its core, and then we’ll completely fuck it up.
00:53:15.000 --> 00:53:21.000
Jackson Hogen: Sorry kitties out there for the F word, but I mean, when it’s new, when it’s needed, it’s needed.
00:53:20.000 --> 00:53:22.000
Stuart Winchester: So give us examples.
00:53:21.000 --> 00:53:35.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, private equity has destroyed K2. Uh, it’s certainly trying the best it can to destroy Rossignol, but there’s a… there’s a great legacy and some really great people at Rossi. Rossi’s head designer, Tor Verdonk, is brilliant and…
00:53:24.000 --> 00:53:26.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:53:35.000 --> 00:53:46.000
Jackson Hogen: thoughtful and on his game and constantly trying to improve, um, their product. Um, their race community is as dedicated as anybody’s could be.
00:53:46.000 --> 00:53:53.000
Jackson Hogen: But even there, it’s not the brand it used to be. It’s… it would be… I think it would be better off if the…
00:53:53.000 --> 00:54:15.000
Jackson Hogen: characters that have it sold it. But right now, the ownership is so deeply Chinese, I don’t know that you’ll ever see a change. I mean, a lot of brands that we think of as Austrian or French or whatever are, in fact, Chinese, which isn’t necessarily the end of the world. Chinese have money. They can build a factory if they want to, and they can build great skis if they want to. There’s plenty of templates out there that you could hand them and say, can you build this? And I’m sure they would answer.
00:54:15.000 --> 00:54:20.000
Jackson Hogen: In whatever dialect they have, then yeah, sure, I can, we can do that.
00:54:21.000 --> 00:54:24.000
Jackson Hogen: But private equity usually.
00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:43.000
Jackson Hogen: gets pretty much everything wrong. Um, and they think they’re the biggest smarty pants in the industry. One of the reasons K2’s in a tailspin, and has been for several years, is the private equity owners they had back then missed their window. They had, uh… they all want to flip what they’ve got. But sometimes, if you miss your flip.
00:54:43.000 --> 00:54:55.000
Jackson Hogen: Now how much longer is it going to take you to get that saleable product back up where the value’s higher while your sales are cratering because of the other idiot decisions that you’ve made?
00:54:55.000 --> 00:55:10.000
Jackson Hogen: Where’s Line, for example? Line, I think, was once the fifth largest brand in the US. When standing in line behind K2, because that’s the bigger brand that they can use to promote, I don’t know what they sell, but I’d be surprised if they sold a thousand pairs at this point.
00:55:11.000 --> 00:55:24.000
Jackson Hogen: Just because they’ve gotten no support. Rozignol has sister brands under its roof. Rozzy gets the money, and the sister brand, not so much. So then you’ve got to make a good story out of…
00:55:24.000 --> 00:55:41.000
Jackson Hogen: not very good decisions. And everyone’s good enough to make storytelling and say, why this new ski we made is going to be so great, but the guts have been taken out. And that the guts have been taken out is an important thing to remember, because manufacturers are reaching a point they’d hoped they’d never have to do, which is they.
00:55:41.000 --> 00:55:53.000
Jackson Hogen: got to raise prices next year. They absolutely, positively have to. They can’t eat more tariff, they can’t eat more anything, they have got to raise prices. It’s the only way to go.
00:55:53.000 --> 00:56:04.000
Jackson Hogen: So if you raise prices, but one of the reasons you haven’t been doing that for years is you’re deathly afraid of losing a price point. What do we do without a $3.99 ski? Oh my god, we’re all gonna die!
00:56:04.000 --> 00:56:17.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, you’re cheaping it! That’s what you do. If you insist that you’re going to need, let’s say, the $499 or $599 retail price point, are you going to make as good as $499 or $599 skis you made 5 years ago?
00:56:17.000 --> 00:56:22.000
Jackson Hogen: No, you’re going to make the ski that in today’s marketplace you can price at that and still make money.
00:56:22.000 --> 00:56:30.000
Jackson Hogen: Because they’re deathly afraid of having to make the 20 to 25 to 30% price increases that they probably should make.
00:56:30.000 --> 00:56:51.000
Jackson Hogen: And you say, oh my god, that’ll chase more people out of the skort. There aren’t many people left to chase out of skiing. We’ve already pretty much gotten the middle class and said, you were great in the 50s and 60s, we loved you, but I’m sorry, we need your space now for a richer guy, because you’re not going to buy the quiche we have for lunch instead of a hot dog, and you’re not ready for what we’re about to do.
00:56:51.000 --> 00:57:04.000
Jackson Hogen: charge you for parking. Done you, if you don’t show… if you don’t show up and take your parking space that you’ve prepaid for 50 bucks, they’re gonna charge you another 100 bucks for having defaulted on your, you know, showing up that day.
00:57:04.000 --> 00:57:09.000
Stuart Winchester: Does anyone actually charge that much? I’ve not, uh… usually the price I hear is… who charges that much?
00:57:04.000 --> 00:57:05.000
Jackson Hogen: Yep.
00:57:06.000 --> 00:57:09.000
Jackson Hogen: Yes. Yes.
00:57:09.000 --> 00:57:17.000
Jackson Hogen: Uh, I’ll let… I’ll let you further your next discussion with a guy whose name I gave you before to explain who’s charging that much, but it…
00:57:14.000 --> 00:57:20.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay, so take us into what happened to K2, like…
00:57:17.000 --> 00:57:21.000
Jackson Hogen: They’re making so much money on parking, they could never go back.
00:57:21.000 --> 00:57:34.000
Stuart Winchester: So take us into what happened to K2. I mean, you said that private equity ruined it, kind of let it stagnate. Did they get rid of their talent, like the designers? Is it a quality issue? Is it a personality issue? What happened there?
00:57:34.000 --> 00:57:43.000
Jackson Hogen: you know, the person… people hold… you know, if you’ve got a good job in the ski industry, you try to hold it as long as you can, so I’m sure there’s people there who are saying, no, we.
00:57:38.000 --> 00:57:40.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:57:43.000 --> 00:57:44.000
Jackson Hogen: But…
00:57:44.000 --> 00:57:51.000
Jackson Hogen: bad decisions are going to be made. If you think back at… think back to when the pinnacle was introduced.
00:57:51.000 --> 00:58:06.000
Jackson Hogen: they… what did they do to try to say it was great? They put a foam core in it and tried to say, well, this is nanotech. Oh, bullshit! You’re just using foam because it’s cheaper. Don’t stop telling me all these advantages that don’t exist. Well, it’s more consistent. Yeah, only if you’re careless about your wood.
00:58:01.000 --> 00:58:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:58:07.000 --> 00:58:25.000
Jackson Hogen: Uh, it’s certainly different, and it’s definitely cheaper. So… so the… but they had to… so the next year, they had to add more wood, and then they did the same thing with the Mindbenders. They came out and they… let’s… they prototyped everything, and I know from back door that they ended up building the women’s ski, not the men’s ski, as they tested. Why? Because it was gonna be cheaper!
00:58:25.000 --> 00:58:26.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
00:58:26.000 --> 00:58:42.000
Jackson Hogen: It’s it’s you keep making the wrong decisions. And then the way that that brand treated their legacy athletes that built that brand for them, the way they treated their dealer network that built that brand for them is disgraceful. And that’s why I’ve been in the war passing of day two.
00:58:42.000 --> 00:58:44.000
Jackson Hogen: You don’t take someone like Seth.
00:58:42.000 --> 00:58:46.000
Stuart Winchester: Well, no, give us, give us details though, like what, how did they treat them?
00:58:44.000 --> 00:58:54.000
Jackson Hogen: Seth Morrison fired on the phone. Kim Reichel dismissed without further ado. The people that currently own Vocal.
00:58:46.000 --> 00:58:48.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay.
00:58:54.000 --> 00:59:04.000
Jackson Hogen: Uh, a terrific brand with great management, brilliant distribution, well-thought-out plan, widely distributed despite its elite, you know, status.
00:59:05.000 --> 00:59:06.000
Jackson Hogen: Um…
00:59:07.000 --> 00:59:19.000
Jackson Hogen: They they fired everybody. They fired everybody in five minutes. People with 20 years experience fired after a five minute interview by some asshole who’s come in and told them that we need to solidify our distribution.
00:59:10.000 --> 00:59:11.000
Stuart Winchester: No.
00:59:19.000 --> 00:59:36.000
Jackson Hogen: I don’t care what that looks like on your business plan, I know what it looks like on the personal level, and it sucks. And was it necessary for them to do that? No, it’s what their logic told them they had to do, because they didn’t have a unified back room, they were… it was, you know, in more than one place, so the smart thing to do is to put it all together in a room.
00:59:23.000 --> 00:59:25.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
00:59:36.000 --> 00:59:39.000
Jackson Hogen: Smart thing to do, except you fired all the people that built your brand.
00:59:40.000 --> 00:59:43.000
Jackson Hogen: I don’t care if you think that’s smart. I think it’s evil.
00:59:43.000 --> 00:59:49.000
Stuart Winchester: And then the retailer network, what was… how did they damage those relationships?
00:59:43.000 --> 00:59:45.000
Jackson Hogen: Okay.
00:59:49.000 --> 00:59:58.000
Jackson Hogen: Badly, they pissed on them. I mean, K2 went, sold as much, every stick that they can sell direct outside their dealer network is a win for them.
00:59:57.000 --> 00:59:58.000
Stuart Winchester: I see.
00:59:59.000 --> 01:00:03.000
Jackson Hogen: So my response to that is, okay, which one of these would you like?
01:00:03.000 --> 01:00:05.000
Stuart Winchester: This is where video is great, guys.
01:00:06.000 --> 01:00:12.000
Stuart Winchester: All right, so K2, are there other brands that have…
01:00:07.000 --> 01:00:08.000
Jackson Hogen: So…
01:00:12.000 --> 01:00:14.000
Stuart Winchester: Ben…
01:00:14.000 --> 01:00:19.000
Stuart Winchester: turned into shells of themselves by private equity or other market forces.
01:00:17.000 --> 01:00:24.000
Jackson Hogen: No, because it’s possible to right the ship. I mean, when Ontosports bought almost all of…
01:00:24.000 --> 01:00:36.000
Jackson Hogen: Solomon and Atomic and Armada, etc. Everyone was right to be somewhat fearful and trembling. Is this… what’s this gonna do to those brands? Lo and behold, they might…
01:00:27.000 --> 01:00:28.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
01:00:36.000 --> 01:00:44.000
Jackson Hogen: I mean, I don’t… I’m not privy to what’s going on in their back room. I’m not… I don’t have telescopes to tell me, you know, if I look close enough.
01:00:44.000 --> 01:00:50.000
Jackson Hogen: But they seem to be more interested in reinvestment.
01:00:50.000 --> 01:00:55.000
Jackson Hogen: than the Chinese people who are involved with K2.
01:00:55.000 --> 01:00:58.000
Jackson Hogen: And I would expect we’re going to see.
01:00:58.000 --> 01:01:15.000
Jackson Hogen: continued innovation from that group, from Atomic Solomon Armada, which I think is being managed well. They, you know, they… if you don’t expect every brand to do everything, they’ve really slotted those brands well. I think, for example.
01:01:15.000 --> 01:01:25.000
Jackson Hogen: Atomic makes unbelievably good race skis. Mikel Schifrin ain’t winning on junk. They know how to build a race ski that absolutely sings. Um…
01:01:20.000 --> 01:01:21.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
01:01:25.000 --> 01:01:35.000
Jackson Hogen: And they’ve… they’re still doing that. They’re not… they’re not cheapening that product one iota. And that… when that comes to the U.S. consumer as a race ski, it has not been degraded.
01:01:35.000 --> 01:01:43.000
Jackson Hogen: But when you move through into the Maverick series, now we’re starting to make choices about the skis that are going to be more economically driven.
01:01:43.000 --> 01:01:50.000
Jackson Hogen: But I think what they did very cleverly is they made, we’ll make a little better all-mountain ski, we’ll slot it into Armada.
01:01:51.000 --> 01:02:05.000
Jackson Hogen: And Armada’s gonna make… and the market will find it, and we’ll make our higher-end, better-performing skis for the all-mountain skier, and slot them into Armada. And then we’re gonna race skis over here on Atomic. Um, you know, they’re…
01:02:05.000 --> 01:02:22.000
Jackson Hogen: They’re figuring out their new brand, I think, well. And I think they’ll sort it through. Everyone else, you’ve got to just be a little nervous about. There’s so many good people at Rosignol who have probably been ignored or pushed aside. I don’t really know what’s going to happen.
01:02:19.000 --> 01:02:21.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah, I think so.
01:02:22.000 --> 01:02:23.000
Jackson Hogen: Um…
01:02:24.000 --> 01:02:34.000
Jackson Hogen: Because it didn’t fit the ethos of the bandits that ended up owning them. Who, again, they probably missed their flip, but at least…
01:02:34.000 --> 01:02:42.000
Jackson Hogen: at least there’s enough really good people and really solid people at Rossi that what they can preserve, they have preserved, but it’s not across the board.
01:02:42.000 --> 01:02:44.000
Jackson Hogen: Um…
01:02:44.000 --> 01:02:49.000
Jackson Hogen: And the pressure on the manufacturer to keep price points.
01:02:49.000 --> 01:03:04.000
Jackson Hogen: is gonna have to give in one way or another. Either the price point moves up, and where’s my $4.99 price point? Well, sorry to tell you, buddy, but that’s now the $5.99 ski. Or, you have to degrade the $4.99 ski. You have to take something out to hit that… to make that even…
01:03:04.000 --> 01:03:07.000
Jackson Hogen: Make it any point in making the bloody ski.
01:03:06.000 --> 01:03:08.000
Stuart Winchester: Right.
01:03:07.000 --> 01:03:14.000
Jackson Hogen: So that pressure, the better decision may not always be made in that context.
01:03:12.000 --> 01:03:19.000
Stuart Winchester: So we’re talking about the big legacy brands. What’s your take, Jackson, on… we saw Peak Skis, which was Bodie Miller’s.
01:03:19.000 --> 01:03:24.000
Jackson Hogen: A joke. A tragically stupid joke. I mean, the arrogance of that guy.
01:03:19.000 --> 01:03:22.000
Stuart Winchester: Brand, go under…
01:03:24.000 --> 01:03:26.000
Jackson Hogen: And where do you think he’s left?
01:03:24.000 --> 01:03:32.000
Stuart Winchester: So that’s Peak. There’s a lot of little independent brands, like Shaggy’s in Michigan, Icelantic in Colorado. Do you…
01:03:31.000 --> 01:03:34.000
Jackson Hogen: Well, there’s… I call them the fleas. There’s hundreds of.
01:03:33.000 --> 01:03:38.000
Stuart Winchester: Okay, and what’s your thought in general on going outside of the legacy network for skis?
01:03:38.000 --> 01:03:49.000
Jackson Hogen: They have no budget. Tirolia’s budget for one year for R&D, I mean, or excuse me, Volkl, let’s say, Volkl’s entire budget for one year for R&D.
01:03:49.000 --> 01:04:03.000
Jackson Hogen: will dwarf every penny ever spent by the top 10 indie brands. I mean, they just don’t have the money, and they don’t have the finish, um, and I’m sure they’re full of passion, and I’m sure the people that do it are great, and blah blah blah.
01:03:52.000 --> 01:03:54.000
Stuart Winchester: Mm-hmm. Okay.
01:04:03.000 --> 01:04:09.000
Jackson Hogen: You’ve got to have the resources to build a great ski. You can’t build it in your basement. You can build a ski.
01:04:09.000 --> 01:04:15.000
Jackson Hogen: Billy built a ski! I’m so proud of you! But it’s not gonna be a very good ski compared to…
01:04:15.000 --> 01:04:19.000
Jackson Hogen: the investment a major manufacturer makes in making their line.
01:04:19.000 --> 01:04:28.000
Jackson Hogen: It’s, you know, it gives you lots of nice warm fuzzies. I do like indies that try to break out and do something different.
01:04:28.000 --> 01:04:33.000
Jackson Hogen: But to survive, they’ve got to find different partners than maybe they’ve had before.
01:04:31.000 --> 01:04:33.000
Stuart Winchester: You know.
01:04:33.000 --> 01:04:36.000
Jackson Hogen: It’s a challenge to be an indie, that’s for sure.
01:04:36.000 --> 01:04:48.000
Stuart Winchester: All right, Jackson, this is all good stuff, and I could do this all day, but we’re gonna have to have you on again soon. For now, leave us with this. What are you up to these days, and can people still reach you, and if so, how?
01:04:48.000 --> 01:04:58.000
Jackson Hogen: Um, I am trying to retreat from skiing so that I can figure out, in the foggy ruins of my mind.
01:04:58.000 --> 01:05:18.000
Jackson Hogen: what… what do I really want to do the most? And I haven’t been able to clear enough debris out of my head to really figure that out. I thought of taking the series that I had on my, um, revelations called The Making of a Skier, and seeing if Seth in Skiing History would have any interest in me fleshing that out so that it’s actually a.
01:05:18.000 --> 01:05:30.000
Jackson Hogen: a volume that traces one skier’s history, um, and that would be interesting to me, because it’s all about me, so of course it would be interesting to me. Um…
01:05:30.000 --> 01:05:49.000
Jackson Hogen: I’m not above writing video. I might collab with one of our great movie creators, Greg Stump, and I have been talking about what both of us could do next, and we’ll see about that. But my biggest goal of the past year has been just trying to make this handoff. I had a.
01:05:49.000 --> 01:06:09.000
Jackson Hogen: enormous problem with my software, which kept billing people, and I kept saying… I kept trying to reach the throat of the software, and every time I thought I’d found the throat and it strangled it, I was wrong. And there was another… and they just kept spitting out invoices, and I’m saying, God’s sake, stop! But all their machinery is built to make that number bigger, not make it smaller. I ended up.
01:05:53.000 --> 01:05:54.000
Stuart Winchester: Umm.
01:06:00.000 --> 01:06:02.000
Stuart Winchester: Oh, jeez.
01:06:09.000 --> 01:06:21.000
Jackson Hogen: going in and person by person, line by line, canceling every single person on Stripe and PayPal as a way to try to… the only way I could find out to figure out how to stop the goddamn.
01:06:15.000 --> 01:06:16.000
Stuart Winchester: Oh jeez, okay.
01:06:21.000 --> 01:06:33.000
Jackson Hogen: recharging machine. So I don’t want to get back into charging people for stuff. I don’t want to end up… my fingers are totally scarred from touching the last time I had to do all that. Um…
01:06:22.000 --> 01:06:24.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
01:06:33.000 --> 01:06:40.000
Jackson Hogen: But I… I’m a writer. I need… I need to write, and when I’m not able to focus on something I’m able to write.
01:06:40.000 --> 01:06:53.000
Jackson Hogen: I’m not a lot of fun to be around, so I’ll find something to chew on. Um, and how to get in touch with me? jacksonatrealskiers.com. If you’ve ever paid me a nickel.
01:06:53.000 --> 01:07:03.000
Jackson Hogen: I’m still so grateful. I will continue to answer your questions. I will continue to help you. I don’t have a list that tells me whether you’re on the help you or not help you list, so…
01:07:03.000 --> 01:07:06.000
Jackson Hogen: Whoever you are, if you have a real problem.
01:07:06.000 --> 01:07:21.000
Jackson Hogen: I can probably fix it. If it’s selecting a ski, I can definitely fix it. Um, I… you mentioned I still work at Bobo’s. Yeah, but only on a client… it’s client-led. If the skier says, I got this problem and I can’t get it fixed anywhere.
01:07:21.000 --> 01:07:26.000
Jackson Hogen: will you come into Bobo’s, meet with me, and solve my problem? And I say.
01:07:24.000 --> 01:07:26.000
Stuart Winchester: That’s in Reno?
01:07:26.000 --> 01:07:35.000
Jackson Hogen: Yeah, they’ll say, yeah, sure. I mean, it won’t… I don’t… I don’t want to join Bobo’s whole staff with all of the attended, you know.
01:07:35.000 --> 01:07:50.000
Jackson Hogen: fit into the system when I can just use the facility to solve your problem. So you have to pay me. You’re not going to say, well, I’m paying the shop. I say, yeah, but in this instance, you’re also going to pay me, because.
01:07:42.000 --> 01:07:43.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
01:07:50.000 --> 01:07:55.000
Jackson Hogen: I work with my collaborator who does work for Globus directly, Theron Lee.
01:07:55.000 --> 01:08:10.000
Jackson Hogen: because four eyes are better than two, and he’s a brilliant problem solver when it comes to the technical side of the sport. And I like solving people’s problems. I like… my proudest moment as a boot fitter was when a gal came in on crutches.
01:08:10.000 --> 01:08:16.000
Jackson Hogen: And I still think emotionally about this gal. She walked out of the store.
01:08:17.000 --> 01:08:18.000
Jackson Hogen: So…
01:08:18.000 --> 01:08:19.000
Stuart Winchester: Amazing.
01:08:19.000 --> 01:08:24.000
Jackson Hogen: I, I know I can, I know I can help you. If I can help that gal, I can help you.
01:08:25.000 --> 01:08:29.000
Stuart Winchester: Well, glad to hear you’re still in it, Jackson, Andy. It sounds like…
01:08:29.000 --> 01:08:46.000
Stuart Winchester: You look good. I know you were battling some things. I hope that you can have a full ski season, or a ski season, and get out there. And please, you’re welcome on the podcast anytime. I think we could do this all the time and talk gear, because you’re…
01:08:46.000 --> 01:08:49.000
Stuart Winchester: So, passionate and knowledgeable in your…
01:08:49.000 --> 01:08:51.000
Stuart Winchester: Knowledge of it going back.
01:08:51.000 --> 01:09:01.000
Stuart Winchester: to what it was, because it changed so quickly and so completely, is really invaluable. So, you’re welcome out anytime, but thanks so much for the time today, Jackson. I really appreciate it.
01:09:01.000 --> 01:09:06.000
Jackson Hogen: You’re more than welcome, and my final note to you, dear listener, is.
01:09:06.000 --> 01:09:19.000
Jackson Hogen: your skis are not going to get cheaper in the future. The good ones are… prices are only going to go up, because the manufacturer can’t keep holding the lid on it just because of their own desire to have a $6.99 price point. So if you want to get a great ski at a…
01:09:13.000 --> 01:09:14.000
Stuart Winchester: Mmhm.
01:09:19.000 --> 01:09:24.000
Jackson Hogen: Won’t necessarily feel like a bargain to you, but compared to the future that I know is coming.
01:09:24.000 --> 01:09:27.000
Jackson Hogen: Every single ski in the market today is a bargain.
01:09:27.000 --> 01:09:32.000
Stuart Winchester: I will take that to heart, and I hope the listeners do as well. Thanks so much, Jackson.
01:09:31.000 --> 01:09:36.000
Jackson Hogen: My pleasure, Stu. By the way, keep doing what you’re doing. You are the best of what skiing has.
01:09:32.000 --> 01:09:34.000
Stuart Winchester: Yeah.
01:09:35.000 --> 01:09:47.000
Stuart Winchester: Well, thank you so much, Jackson. I appreciate it. I’m trying to seek out the… my slogan is, uh, everyone’s looking for skiing soul, I’m trying to find the brains. So… so I found a good one today, man. Thanks so much.
01:09:43.000 --> 01:09:45.000
Jackson Hogen: I love that line.
01:09:48.000 --> 01:09:51.000
Stuart Winchester: All right, you too. Take care. Bye.
