Hey everybody and welcome back to Gear 30 on the Blister Podcast Network.

I'm Jonathan Ellsworth, the founder of Blister, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing and all of our other podcasts over at blisterreview.com.

My guest today is Alex Herbert, who is the founder of Kingswood Skies, which is located on the South Island of New Zealand.

Kingswood Skies is a small and very independent ski company.

Part of the reason why it is an independent ski company

is because its founder, Alex, is an extremely independent person.

Now, Alex also operates a ski repair business,

and so when Alex is not building skis, he is often repairing them.

And I think that combination provides a really interesting perspective on ski construction and design.

So in our conversation here, we actually kick things off by just talking a little bit about

what life in New Zealand has looked like in this COVID-19 era,

and we talk about the Southern Hemisphere Ski Season and how that's shaping up.

Then from there, Alex gives us a kind of quick backstory on the history of Kingswood,

and then we start to nerd out a little bit about ski materials and sidewalls and

cap construction and base material thickness and ski shapes and the like.

Finally, we talk a bit about what exactly is going on in Kingswood's race department?

It's definitely not what you might think.

And then we wrap up by talking about what we're celebrating,

and Alex offers up some very good suggestions.

So that's what we've got in store for you today.

And so now let's go ahead and get to my conversation with Kingswood Ski's founder, Alex Herbert.

Well, Alex, how are you today and where are you today?

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