BURLINGTON — At 46, J Levinthal has been well known to serious skiers for two decades, since he won fame in the skiing community as one of the first creators of the twin-tip ski — skis that have a rounded and upwardly curving tail that is similar to the tip.
The style is so well-established now that twin-tip skis are just known as “skis.” But when Levinthal, then a skier-turned-snowboarder, was starting out in his parents’ garage 20 years ago, there were just a few people experimenting with making a shorter double-tipped ski that gave skiers the versatility enjoyed by snowboarders.
Levinthal, who was featured in Newsweek at 25 for the skis, says he didn’t invent the twin-tip ski (“there are photos of wooden twin-tip skis,” he said); all he did was bring it to market after creating a version while he was a design student at the University of Buffalo. Levinthal was only selling 1,000 pairs of skis a year until the ski maker Salomon started mass-producing the twin-tip ski and used its advertising might to draw the attention of ski stores and mainstream skiers.
In 1998, Levinthal and his friend Mike Nick competed in the X Games on the company’s ski boards; Levinthal took the bronze and Nick took the gold in a slopestyle event on a snowboard course.
Media interviews ensued, and orders flowed to the giant ski companies and to tiny Line Ski Boards, which by then occupied a 3,000-square-foot warehouse in the Albany area. But more orders meant more expenses for Levinthal’s small ski company, and in 1999, he realized he didn’t know anything about business.
“It was nuts,” said Levinthal in a story he also recounted as a panelist at the Outdoor Business Alliance summit Oct. 18 at Bolton Valley Resort. The company was making 4,000 pairs of skis a year, and Levinthal had hired several friends to help him build the skis and travel with him to trade shows.
“I thought I was making money,” Levinthal said. “One day I in 1999 I realized I owed the banks $300,000, I owed 60 grand on my credit cards, I owed my mom 20 grand, and I had $1,500 in my bank account.”
Majority ownership by the Burlington based cross-country ski company Karhu – which paid off Line’s debts — soon followed. Levinthal and his workers moved to Vermont, and Karhu took control of 60% of the company, and eventually, in 2006, sold Line off to the Seattle company K2 Sports.
Levinthal worked for K2 for a few years and then struck out on his own in 2013. Now he runs five-person J Skis from an office in Burlington, and sells about 3,000 pairs of his twin-tip skis – made in Quebec – online. In 2017, J Skis bought 4FRNT Skis Inc. of Salt Lake City.
Levinthal spent some time talking to VTDigger about the business of making skis. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
VTDigger: Why did Karhu sell Line to K2?
J Levinthal: The reality is that there are half a million skis being sold a year in the U.S., and you are selling like 6,000 or 7,000 pairs total. There’s a limited market.
People were patting us on the back, we were in the magazines, we had the best pro riders. … It was like a secret handshake; if you knew who Line was, you were the future of the sport. But that was such a small percent of the people. We couldn’t make enough money to sustain the business. Everyone thinks we’re killing it, but you don’t make enough profit to pay yourselves. In 2006, Doug (Barbor, president of Trak Sports USA, the parent of Karhu) said, “Enough is enough; we can’t grow this and we can’t lose more money; we need to sell this.”
They acquired 100% of Line and we got paid nothing; they just paid off our debt.
People think if you sell a company, it means you made money, and it’s true that if you sell Instagram, you do. But I’m freaking making skis. You would never open a store on Main Street and only sell something when it snows, and only to people who go to a mountain. The market is tiny.
VTD: What was it like working for a large publicly traded company like K2 after being an entrepreneur?
JL: I was skeptical; should I go work for these guys? Is it really me? One person – I think it was my uncle – said, ‘You’ve got nothing to lose, and the minimum you’ll get out of it is you’ll learn a lot. They’re going to operate so different.’
Here I had a chance to work for a public company, and sure enough I learned a lot. There were 100 people from 100 different locations around the world at the sales meeting to sell Line, my brand. And I didn’t have to do anything; all I had to do was tell them about my damned skis.
You’re part of a huge conglomerate, and everything is done for you as it’s done for everyone else. By the time I left in 2013, we were selling 40,000 pairs of skis, the most we had ever sold; we just grew exponentially under K2.
VTD: How are the skis that J Skis sells different from others?
JL: Everyone is making kind of similar products. Are my skis different? Hell yeah they are different … like every sneaker, every car is different. I continue to work with Francois Sylvain, a Quebec engineer who worked with us after Karhu acquired us. He came back and joined me when I started J Skis and he’s still engineering our skis. We’re still evolving. You’re always evolving, whatever you learn.
I sign and number every pair of skis. Selling direct enables me to build a higher quality product and sell it at competitive prices. We collaborate with hundreds of artists, and build limited special-edition graphics, and once the graphic is sold out, it’s gone forever; you own something special.
It’s like buying from a farm stand; that’s not typical in skiing. Who knows who started Rossignol? Who is the person behind that? Customers can email, call or stop by and talk to me. I talk to thousands of customers and I enjoy that. I didn’t enjoy being behind the curtain at K2; I wanted to connect one-on-one with my real customers. I was talking to stores, and stores are great — I couldn’t have sold skis without them — but they are not the people riding the ski.
With stores, I was being directed what to make, essentially. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Selling directly, I can take an artist’s painting and put it all over the ski and people go nuts for it. They love it. I am building skis for myself and for skiers who love skiing for the fun of it. I’m not going to build that for a store or for a public company.
VTD: How did acquiring 4FRNT change things?
JL: They are exceptional powder skis. They have a niche. They are hard-charging, good for touring, and they have a slightly different focus and a different group of customers that follow them and are core fans.
They had started in 2002 and were selling to stores and were in a challenging position, kind of like the same position I was in when I got acquired. They couldn’t make ends meet. I wanted to see if we could help make it happen for the brand, and keep it in business and apply what I had learned.
Some of their skis are made in Slovenia, and we are slowly making more of them in Quebec.
VTD: Why do you sell online only?
JL: You make a ski for let’s say $200, and then you sell it to the store for $300, and they sell it for $600. At the end of the day, you have to sell up to 40,000 skis a year if you are selling to stores. There’s so little margin. It’s a very expensive business.
To me it was a huge opportunity to capitalize on e-commerce and digital marketing and eliminate altogether the entire traditional distribution chain. I didn’t need to own anything; I could work on my laptop at the kitchen table and outsource everything and sell direct to my customers.
You only have to sell 3,000 online to break even. I’m also running at crazy lean. There is a lot you don’t need when you sell direct. There are no trade shows, no sales reps, no sales manager … just so many things you don’t have to do any longer.
There are other things you do have to do; it’s complicated. We were manufacturing it ourselves at our own factory, and there are so many expenses to that. Then we moved to the factory in Quebec, which was Karhu’s factory.
VTD: Are you going to get into clothing like Burton did?
JL: We make tons of clothing, but not outerwear. That’s too complicated. We sell thousands of T-shifts and hats and hoodies, just to represent skiing, and we make funny stuff. Skiing is a lifestyle, and this is one of the few brands where you know the person who owns the brands and designs the skis.
VTD: What’s next?
JL: I’m going to try to stay in business, just run really lean and efficient. I’m going to stay in Burlington because I love this place and the attitude, the culture, the enthusiasm for the entrepreneurial spirit, the ruralness of it. It has everything that a lot of bigger cities have, but it’s not in your face. You see cows on the side of the road, yet there are aeorospace companies here you didn’t realize existed. McDonald’s goes out of business, and it’s replaced by a burger place that only serves organic food.
Even though the skiing is mediocre, if you know what I mean — I have skied all over the world, and there is better skiing everywhere — there is no better quality of life. And that’s what really matters at the end of the day.
VTD: What advice do you give other would-be entrepreneurs?
JL: I spent so many years struggling. I basically sold the company twice because we didn’t financially make it. The biggest lesson I learned is, ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself, live within your means, and grow at a sustainable rate.’
Our tagline is, “it’s just skiing.” We’re not battling for world domination here; we’re just making a bunch of freaking skis.
If you could own one pizza shop instead of 20 and make the same money, wouldn’t you rather just own one? I’m not looking for more headaches; I’m looking for more financial sustainability. Whatever is more efficient is the way I want to operate.
It’s a dangerous industry because the sales cycle is so incredibly short, and no matter what you do, after December, you’re going to always sell less every month. You have three months to sell more: October, November and December. I have a very good understanding and respect for the dangers of being so seasonal. You don’t want to go out there and bite off more than you can chew.
