Why a Blister Award Means More to Us Than Most
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Every ski brand collects awards. We’ve got a few now, and we’re proud of all of them. But when Blister put our whole lineup, the Sabr, the Kanso, and the Meraki, on their recommended list this year, that one hit different. Here’s why.
They can’t be bought
Start with the thing nobody likes to say out loud: most gear coverage is tangled up with ad money. Blister isn’t. They take no money from the companies they review. You can’t buy your way into their guide, and they don’t sell advertising in it. For a small brand like us, that’s everything. It means the recommendation wasn’t a favor, a trade, or a relationship. They skied our skis, judged them against everything else out there, and said what they thought. Nobody paid for the answer.
When a review source has no financial reason to like you, their liking you actually counts.
They actually ski the thing
The other problem with most “buyer’s guides” is that they’re assembled from a few days at an industry demo, or worse, from spec sheets and press releases. Not Blister. They kept our skis for an entire season. Not a weekend, not a demo day, a full winter, which means our skis got ridden in every condition imaginable: deep days, boilerplate, spring slush, chop, the works. On top of that they run Blister Labs, a quantitative testing partnership with CU Boulder and Western Colorado University, to measure the stuff your hands can’t feel.
That matters to us specifically because of how we build. We don’t chase a spec sheet. We obsess over how a ski feels, the flex underfoot, where the weight sits, how it releases a turn. That’s exactly the stuff you only catch by skiing a ski hard, in everything, over a long time. A tester reading numbers off a sheet would miss what we spent years dialing. A full season on snow doesn’t miss it. So when they got it, it told us the thing we care most about actually came through.
Why we show up every year
We go to the Blister Summit every year. It’s their on-snow gathering where brands, testers, and regular skiers all end up on the same hill, clicking into the same skis, comparing notes in the lift line. We don’t go to schmooze. We go because it’s one of the few places in this industry where the conversation is honestly about how gear performs, not who’s spending what on marketing. It’s our kind of room.
Standing a four-year-old brand’s three skis next to decade-old favorites from companies a hundred times our size, in front of the people who test more gear than anyone, and having all three land on the recommended list? That’s the review we’d have asked for if we got to pick.
The short version
We’re not telling you to trust us. We’re telling you to trust the people who have no reason to go easy on us, and pointing out that they didn’t. If you want to see how our skis stack up against the whole field, Blister’s reviews are a good place to start. Then come find us.
Read the Blister reviews →
Pray for pow,
Kevin