3 PAIRS OF J.SKIS, FROM TOP: THE JOYRIDE PSYCHONAUT, TALLBOY X J COLLAB; THE BEST FRIEND GOOD DAY, FANK X J COLLAB; THE ALLPLAY NIGHTLIFER, MATT STIKKER X J COLLAB
Back in the 1990’s, skiing was a dying sport, while snowboarding was thriving. The only skis available then were long, straight, and made for racing. If you were a kid named Jason Levinthal, who wanted to be doing what snowboarders were but on skis, you decided to reinvent the sport.
Twin tip skis are an everyday site on the slopes now and have made freestyle skiing as popular as snowboarding. Skiers are able to pull off the tricks and jumps once the domain of snowboarders only. Jason Levinthal is the founder of J.Skis, and has not only changed the way people ski, but how skis are sold. Jason was also the founder of Line skis, the first twin-tip skis, the company he launched in 1995, after creating a prototype for a senior year school project. Originally, they were short skis that looked like mini snowboards called skiboards.
The story of the evolution goes like this… After college, Jason decided to pursue making these new kind of freestyle skis. He moved back home and started working out of his parents garage to produce them. He called the company Line. After refining the prototype, he headed to SIA, then the mega ski and snowboard tradeshow in Las Vegas. There were hundreds of snowboard companies and no one was interested in his skis — or so he thought, until about 3 weeks later, when he got a fax (remember those) from a Japanese distributor who wanted 1000 pairs. Great news, but not an easy task to produce. With the help of friends, he was able to deliver 1000 pairs by the end of the summer.
JASON IN THE GARAGE WITH ONE OF THE FIRST LINE SKIBOARDS
The next year he headed back to SIA, and now there were a few companies making skiboards, including Salomon. It was tough to compete with a big ski brand like that, which had the resources and distribution to get their skiboards into any store that sold Salomon skis. But they were also the sponsor of the X-Games, and convinced the organizers to include skiboarding as a slopestyle event in 1998. Jason’s friend, Mike Nick, riding on Line, ended up winning the gold medal, and Jason took home the bronze.
With that, Jason and Line skis started getting press — the game changer being a New York Times article in 1999: Skiboarding: A New Thrill-a-Minute Craze. It called the sport “a gleeful mix of skiing, snowboarding, ice skating and in-line skating” and highlighted Line as the industry leader. Jason finally started getting orders in the US, and producing longer twin-tip skis in 1999. But at this point, he was in deep debt from the operation and production costs of starting the company.
When K2 approached him about buying Line, Jason sold the company, not making any money from the deal, but getting out of debt. “Perception is not always reality’”, he told me. “The reality was we were struggling and K2 picked us up and took care of our debt and enabled us to expand. I was still running the brand from 2000 to 2006. We grew it and it was great, but I got to the point where I was asking myself, ‘what’s my future?’” That’s when he realized e-commerce was the answer.
“I approach business the same as skiing. If I want to land a big jump, I drop in with as much speed as possible and figure out how to land it in the air. If I don’t land it, I’ll figure out what to change so that next time I do.”
“I thought I might be able to pull this off on my own, but doing it completely different, doing nothing that big corporations were doing, in fact the exact opposite in terms of operations, distribution, sales, and marketing.” And he wasn’t going to sell to retailers. When he told K2 he was leaving and going to sell skis online, they thought he was crazy. “But I knew the technology and awareness from consumers. They were ready for it, but it just wasn’t being done.”
He launched J.Skis in 2013. Selling exclusively online completely changed the profit margin. Instead of making $100 per pair selling to a store, now he was making $400 per pair selling direct to consumer. “Instead of having to sell 30,000 skis to break even, I could sell 3000. How would I do that? Digital marketing, social media, YouTube. I don’t need to go to trade shows. I don’t need to spend money on sales reps. I don’t need to convince shops. I don’t need a huge accounting department to follow up to get paid by a store. Instead, I can just be myself and represent who I am. There has never been a ski company with the owner as the face of the brand. Now I could speak to my customer daily.”
Curious about his business background, he told me, “I approach business the same as skiing. If I want to land a big jump, I drop in with as much speed as possible and figure out how to land it in the air. If I don’t land it, I’ll figure out what to change next time so I do.”
Jason has been a pioneer in many categories of the ski industry, from inventing the first twin tip skis, to selling skis online, to thriving as a small independent ski company. “I’m no bigger now than I was back in 1999, selling 4000 skis. I’m still selling 4000 skis, but now it’s sustainable as a small business. Think of it like the beer business. There are the microbrews and then there’s Budweiser. I’m the microbrew. A lot of small ski brands are doing fine in that business model, which wasn’t previously possible.”
J.Skis are all produced as Limited Editions, and most as collaborations with different artists. J.Skis are as regarded and coveted for their graphics, as they are for their performance, and as much fun to look at, as they are to ski. There are 4 different collections, and one of those is a short ski called SKIBLADEZZZ – “Half the size, double the fun”- modeled on his original skiboard that launched it all.
