![]() ![]() Their last shot at a game-changing ski, the BBR, didn’t achieve the traction they hoped for instead of creating a whole new genre of surf-inspired skis they were treated as curios and largely overlooked by ski buyers. Today, while Salomon remains a dominant player in the alpine boot market, their mantle of market leadership in skis has lost some of its luster. When Salomon debuted their monocoque skis they made such an impact that within two years, if you were a ski brand without a cap ski, you didn’t sell any skis. Meanwhile, Salomon’s SNS Nordic boot-binding system caught the sleepy XC market by surprise, running up a dominant market share. By the end of the decade, there were hardly any overlap boots left in the market: the Nordica line was down to one 4-buckle boot and even Lange made a couple of half-hearted stabs at a rear-entry configuration. Their first boot, the rear-entry SX 90, introduced to modest applause in 1979, morphed into the SX 91, which led the brand to overtake Nordica in total dollars by 1985. All that remains on our end is a lingering respect for Salomon’s meticulous R&D methodology, which resulted in a series of landmark product introductions that completely upended the established order. ![]() In the interests of full disclosure, the purveyors of realskiers once served in product management roles at Salomon, although our tenure was so long ago that the company we toiled for bears little relation to the Salomon organization of today. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |