Home grown: Why Utah Ski companies chose to reshore manufacturing.

• Author: Madison, Rachel
• Position: Techknowledge - RAMP Sports

Wen Mike Kilchenstein, president and CEO of Park City-based RAMP Sports, first started his company in late 2009, the business didn't yet have a factory. He couldn't find the flexibility he wanted for his skis and snowboards in the United States, which forced him to look overseas.

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"We knew the kind of products we wanted to make he says. "I had worked at Rossignol for [several] years, so I knew what the market was looking for. In the beginning when we had no factory and we were outsourcing, there were not many options in the U.S. [American] factories had limited capabilities."

RAMP Sports ended up outsourcing to a factory in Taiwan. "Eventually we went through the pain of being an outsourcing company," Kikhenstein says. "We learned things always come in late and took longer than we thought. We'd want to do a test at [Oregon's] Mt. Hood and we couldn't because we wouldn't have the product."

That's when Kilchenstein decided it was time to look at other options, the main one being reshoring the company's manufacturing.

A similar story took place at Salt Lake City-based DPS Skis, which was founded in 2005. Because the company is based on high technology, a clean design and a constant evolution of product, says founder Stephan Drake, when it was manufacturing all of its products in China, the business hit a wall.

"We started to hit a wall in terms of being able to continue developing and testing products," Drake says. "We wanted to have complete control over our proprietary technology and keep it under our own roof. We didn't want it to leak to the rest of world and have someone else develop it faster. We also wanted total control of our production in terms of delivery and timing."

In-house Technology

As Kikhenstein was starting to solve RAMP Sports' outsourcing issues, the company was also developing ideas for better materials to make skis and snowboards out of, as well as a better process.

"We created a much more flexible process that would allow for basically any material to be used and any shape to be used." Kilchenstein says. "We looked at what the aerospace industry does, which is use a vacuum process. That's much more flexible because it doesn't matter what shape you're molding. That's when we realized we had an idea for a new molding type That's when RAMP Sports started to build its own Utah factory, and within just a couple of months, the first pairs of skis were made. The entire company's operations were reshored...