BODE MILLER HAS BEEN PUSHING THE ENVELOPE OF SKI DESIGN SINCE HE WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. AND NOW, HE AND INDUSTRY VETERAN ANDY WIRTH HAVE CO-FOUNDED A SKI BRAND THAT PROMISES TO SHAKE UP THE STATUS QUO.
Bode Miller in Montana. PHOTO BY DAVE PECUNIES
BODE MILLER IS WHISPERING in a gravelly voice when he picks up the phone, and I think maybe he’s got laryngitis. Or maybe he just woke up? But, no. He’s just finished putting down Scarlet, his 11-month-old baby, for a nap, and he’s sneaking quietly out of the room in his Spanish Peaks home in Big Sky, Mont. It is a moment that tells me much about the retired World Cup ski racer.
Retired is a relative term. Bode Miller, America’s winningest male alpine ski racer of all time, is one of the hardest-working retired people you’ll encounter. He’s partnered with Revo goggles and Scarpa boots. He’s an ambassador for an online ski academy and an indoor ski dome. But his most recent venture is a big one: Miller partnered with the also-not-so-retired Andy Wirth, former president and CEO of the resort formerly known as Squaw Valley, to launch the Peak Ski Company. (No relation to this magazine, by the way.) All the while raising a big family with his wife, retired pro volleyball player Morgan Beck.
Miller has always been interested in ski design. When he was at Carrabassett Valley Academy, he was intrigued by how much snowboarders could carve on short boards with lots of sidecut. “I was trying to convince [K2 rep] George Tormey that we needed to build shaped skis,” Miller says. So he took a bandsaw and sawed a snowboard in half, mounted bindings on the makeshift skis and proved his point on snow. “I used my special skill, which is incredible stubbornness and determination, and just wore him down.”
A week before the 1996 Junior Olympics, Tormey gave Miller one of the first pairs of the K2 Four, the brand’s earliest shaped ski. The 18-year-old won the Super G by 2.02 seconds and the GS by 2.11. “Where everybody else was just chiseling sideways on the ice, I was laying pure arcs,” he says. The win sent shockwaves through the ski industry. The K2 Four went on to become the No. 1-selling ski in America.
Bode Miller is known for his performance on the racecourse, but he can rip a line in Alaska too. PHOTO BY FREDRIK MARMSATER/COURTESY OF PEAK SKIS
THE CO-FOUNDERS OF PEAK SKIS—Wirth as chief executive officer and Miller as chief innovation officer—are contrarians willing to develop and market a new ski in nontraditional ways. In 2012, when Wirth was chairman of the Lake Tahoe Winter Olympic Committee, the two met and ended up in indepth conversations around bringing the Winter Olympics to Tahoe. They became close friends. “We’re really simpatico,” Wirth says, “but we also bring different things to the table.” For his part, Wirth brings innovation to Peak Skis’ marketing and company structure, raising capital, securing trademarks, digging in on research, running extensive analytics and business modeling—and building a dream team that includes renowned big-mountain skiers Chris Davenport and Michelle Parker. Wirth explored the direct-to-consumer model, spending hours on the phone with Blair Clark, president of Canyon Bikes, a company that successfully broke the mold with e-commerce in an industry dominated by bike shops. While boutique ski brands do sell directly to consumers, Peak Skis will be the first to take the approach on a large scale, selling 10,000 skis in the first year. Wirth wants Peak Skis to be to the hardgoods industry what Uber was to taxis.
“There’s no single element of this company that accepts the status quo,” Wirth says. “We want to do things notably different.” This season’s line, called Peak by Bode Miller, has six models, four for all-mountain and two for sidecountry. The company’s long-term strategic initiatives include reengineering the ski manufacturing process from the foundation up, including the elimination of production waste like glues, resins and epoxies. Peak plans to develop new thermoplastics, borrowing technology from the aerospace and aeronautical sectors, and to integrate technologies like ultra wide band (UWB), which is used for location tracking.
“The innovation piece is not just the product itself,” Wirth says. “It was that the innovation would unleash Bode’s thinking.” Miller has no formal training in engineering, but he thinks like an engineer. Wirth calls Miller the Chuck Yeager of ski development. Yeager was a pilot who could go out and fly the Bell X-1, then come back and interface with the aeronautical engineers, articulating things like a little warble on the wing at Mach 1. Miller, likewise, can take a prototype out for a test spin and come back with specific suggestions for tweaking the construction, materials and geometry. “He doesn’t just say, ‘Make it stiffer,’” Wirth says. It’s the kind of feedback loop that not all high-level skiers are able to articulate.
“THE INNOVATION PIECE IS NOT JUST THE PRODUCT ITSELF. IT WAS THAT THE INNOVATION WOULD UNLEASH BODE’S THINKING.”–ANDY WIRTH, PEAK SKIS CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
Miller racing at the 2015 FIS Ski World Championships at Beaver Creek. PHOTO BY CODY DOWNARD/COURTESY OF U.S. SKI & SNOWBOARD
“I think what drove me to it was necessity,” Miller says. “I couldn’t ski the way I wanted to on the skis. I sort of trained myself, mentoring underneath some of the best ski engineers on the planet, even aerospace engineers.”
Miller has a signature goggle with Revo. PHOTO COURTESY OF REVO
Wirth and Miller are also taking a different approach to selling skis. Retail sales are traditionally very transactional. “If you buy a ski from a shop and go ski it for a week,” Davenport says, “they’re not taking that ski back.” Peak Skis are sold directly to consumers with a 30- day money-back guarantee. “Ultimately if you have as much confidence as we do in the performance of this ski, it’s not a risk,” Miller says. Each new pair of skis will arrive packaged in a sleek custom-made box with a handwritten note from Wirth. Cue the unboxing videos.
Miller partners with Scarpa. PHOTO COURTESY OF SCARPA
MILLER SAYS HE’S BEEN DRIVEN
by innovation “since forever” and he credits shaped skis for landing him a spot on the U.S. Ski Team. “I was skinny, and tactically and technically, I was terrible,” says Miller. But in 1997 in his first World Cup start, Miller qualified for the flip (the top 30 racers) from a starting position of 69 on a pair of K2 Merlins he helped build. “I mean, they had packed up the finish. I was at the top with some guy from Turkey.” He ended up in 11th. Suddenly Miller was on the U.S. Ski Team’s A-team and had earned a spot at the Nagano Olympics. The skis made the difference.
Trying to find the ceiling on Peak Skis. PHOTO BY FREDRIK MARMSATER/COURTESY OF PEAK SKIS
During his career, Miller continued to push brands on ski design. In 2003, Miller was racing on Rossignol prototypes that he loved. What he didn’t know at the time: The company had tried to attach a VAS dampening device to the ski’s topsheet, but it wouldn’t stick. They ended up cutting a hole through the ski’s aluminum layer to affix the dampener. Racing on those prototypes, Miller won the GS at the 2003 World Championships in St. Moritz and took home a crystal globe in GS in 2004. Years later, Miller retrieved the prototype skis from Canadian Thomas Grandi—who’d won the only two World Cup podiums of his career on the skis—and he took them apart, delaminating the layers in a hot box. That’s when Miller discovered the hole, instantly realizing it was the secret sauce.
That hole is the genesis for Peak Skis’ “keyhole technology,” essentially a cutout inside the ski’s core at the front of the ski. For any level skier, it delivers ease of turn initiation while retaining power underfoot, grip and traction when the ski is loaded up. Wirth brought in David Currier, an Olympic ski racer and longtime magazine ski tester, to test prototypes. “I was leery at first, but the skis are truly remarkable. They have amazingly easy turn initiation, and they only get better as speed increases and the hill steepens,” he says. “They’ve achieved that holy grail combination of soft easy feel and powerful edgehold and stability in all phases of the turn.”
Most of Peak Skis are made in the Elan factory in Slovenia, though the company’s 20,000 square feet of space in Bozeman includes the Development Group & Innovation Center, where a select line of skis are made. The Peak team—including Marc Peruzzi, another longtime ski tester and the company’s VP of product and content—tests prototypes at Big Sky and Bridger Bowl. The company designated enough money to R&D to have the ability to try things—and fail. “Most companies won’t take that risk,” Miller says. “You know, the first guy over the hill takes the arrows.”
Miller does some quality control on a pair of Peak Skis. PHOTO BY DAVE PECUNIES
IT’S AN EARLY MORNING IN MARCH
before the slopes of Snowmass have opened for the day, and Miller is headlining a Revo First Tracks event, skiing with young racers, Bode fans and assorted hangers-on, this writer included. (Miller played a hands-on role in developing the Revo x Bode Miller goggle.) As I ski behind him, Miller ramps up his speed and straight jams a turn on a patch of ice. “They just don’t hop or get squirrely,” he tells me at the bottom. “It’s a ski I can’t find the ceiling on.”
The Peak Skis dream team, from left: Chris Davenport, Bode Miller, Andy Wirth and (in front) Michelle Parker. PHOTO BY DAVE PECUNIES
In Snowmass, we also talk about Miller’s ideas for ski boots. The guy has ideas. Last January, Miller came on board with Scarpa as an athlete ambassador and adviser. While it may seem like an unlikely alliance—Scarpa is a ski-mountaineering brand; Miller is an alpine ski racer— Scarpa clearly saw the value in feedback from one of the world’s best skiers. While he’ll continue to help the brand fine-tune its line, Miller can’t help but question ski boot design altogether. “Ski boots haven’t really changed much in the last 50 years,” he says. “The front of the boot is where all your flexing happens, and the back is virtually rigid. As you tighten the overlapping parts of a four-buckle boot, it changes the entire mechanics and ergonomics of the boot.” Miller says there was wisdom in the rear-entry boot design, which made a brief ignominious appearance in the 1980s. It’s another radical idea. But so was the shaped ski. And, maybe, so is drilling holes in skis.
Miller also points out that the ski-boot-binding system is so interconnected it needs to be synergistic. He thinks the industry is stuck, with different brands working in specific gear silos. “There are a lot of really sharp people working on designs, but there’s not a lot of cross-pollination,” he says.
Beck and Miller at home with Scarlet. PHOTO BY SAM FAIRCHILD
That’s part of why Miller is so stoked about Peak Skis. “We’re small, certainly, but solid economically, so we can fund those kinds of initiatives without being beholden to a big conglomerate private equity firm.” While the focus is currently on the ski line, eventually Miller hopes to design a complete integrated system of skis, boots and bindings.
Prepping for a Montana hike. PHOTO BY MORGAN BECK
Beyond the arena of hardgoods, Wirth and Miller are collaborating on the Alpine-X indoor ski dome, a project still in the nascent stages. Ski domes, Wirth says, are like climbing gyms. You learn to love the sport indoors and eventually transition outdoors. Miller partnered with Kirk Spahn, founder and president of the Institute for Civic Leadership Academy. Miller serves as “champion mentor” for ICL’s winter sports program, where ski racers train with their local clubs and attend school online. Building on that existing online platform, Wirth and Miller have plans to create a brick-and-mortar Bode Miller Ski Academy. Colorado’s Granby Ranch was announced as the first location, but the deal was scuttled in October. For now, they’ve moved the academy project to the back burner so they can concentrate on Peak Skis.
Miller and Nash on the chairlift. PHOTO BY BODE MILLER
When I ask Miller during a phone interview, as he’s driving across Utah in a Sprinter van with the family, how a retired guy finds so much passion to pursue so many different ventures, he tells me I’ve got it all wrong. His focus is 94% family. “All the other things fit into the other 6%. It’s a pretty crowded 6%.”
Beck with Nate in Beaver Creek in 2017. PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. SKI & SNOWBOARD
Miller’s brood of eight includes Nash, 7, Easton, 4, identical twins Asher and Aksel, 3, late daughter Emeline and Scarlet, as well as Dace, 14, and Nate, 9, from previous relationships. Three years ago, the Millers moved from California to Montana, where Miller serves as an ambassador for the Spanish Peaks Mountain Club. The Millers’ compound in Big Sky is filled with kids, including Beck’s older sister’s kids. They built a 10-bed bunk room to fit them all in, not to mention cats and dogs. “I’m up at six cooking food for a whole herd of kids,” Miller says. “It’s like we’re running a summer camp.” Beck coaches volleyball at the local schools, so Miller is often on duty, from diaper changes to nighttime tuck-ins. “Raising kids in Orange County would be incredibly challenging. Everybody thinks their first car should be a Mercedes,” Miller says. “That’s not how I grew up. We didn’t even have a TV. I wanted our kids to experience nature and develop some inherent toughness and grit. I knew Montana would be better for our kids, and I think Morgan knew it too.”
A tender moment with Emeline. PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. SKI & SNOWBOARD
Losing 19-month-old Emeline, who died in 2018 in a tragic drowning accident, also informed the full-time move to Big Sky. “We still mourn her. I don’t think that ever stops,” Miller says. “In the beginning, you’d have a moment of reflection and it would just crush you. It was debilitating. But we’re in a pretty healthy place now where the severe pain has kind of normalized.” Being surrounded by the kids helps. “There’s so much that they need from us—but there’s also so much love.”
Between family life and work, Miller is busy. “I’m chronically oversubscribed, but that’s just part of my nature,” he says. His brain works best when things are frenetic. “It seems to spur on different creative paths.” But he’s clear with any business partners that there will be times when they’ll want him to show up for an important meeting and he’ll beg off. “I’m going to say, ‘Nope, my kid’s got a soccer tournament.’”
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