Custom Skis, Part I: My Skier DNA

By Catherine Lutz

When you’re building a custom ski, does it matter if your regular activities include sex, cigars, “420 activities” or lighting things on fire?

This is one of the things I ponder as I’m filling out my skier profile on the Wagner Custom Skis website. The skier profile, or skier DNA, is the first in a series of steps to creating your very own, unique, personalized skis that will be like nobody else’s in the whole world. Length, dimensions, flex, camber and graphics – they will all be fit to my tastes, my likes, my body type, my style. Talk about fulfilling a fantasy, at least for this skier.

The skier profile actually asks you a lot of standard questions before getting to the sex and cigars, like what type of snow and terrain you usually ski, what you’re looking for in a ski and whether you compete (because, presumably, enough people who might order a custom ski do). Of course there’s the requisite physical details – height, weight, years skiing and so forth – and the survey also gets down to fine details like how you buckle your boots and what your ski buddies ski.

I asked Pete Wagner, founder of the company, why the somewhat unusual list of activities? He said he wanted to keep the process fun, but in all seriousness, also thought that kind of information might be useful to profiling the person and what kind of skier they might be. I can see that....

To read Part II, click here.