Shop Talk: Pulling Back the Curtain on Gear Testing

GEAR:30

BLISTER

Arts, Design, Skiing, Snow, Snowboarding, Sports, Outdoors, Bike, Technology, Gear

4.9 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2021

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We’re pulling back the curtain on ski testing, and to provide their wealth of experience in this arena are The Ski Monster co-founder & CEO, George Michaelsen, and Matt Berkowitz, who is now the brand director of The Ski Monster and who has participated in too many ski tests to count. We discuss good ways and bad ways to conduct gear tests; how and why The Ski Monster has been able to ramp up the amount of gear testing they’re doing; and why not all gear tests are created equal.

TOPICS & TIMES:

George Michaelsen’s questionable life decision (6:21)
Matt Berkowitz’s ski industry background (10:28)
Ski Monster update (17:05)
How industry ski tests work (19:06)
Ski tuning & ski testing (42:00)
Different reviewers & reviewing (53:58)
What We’re Celebrating (1:10:00)

RELATED LINKS

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, welcome back to Gear 30 on the Blister Podcast Network.
0:10.0	I'm Jonathan Ellsworth, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing over
0:15.2	at BlisterReview.com.
0:18.7	Okay, so today on the show, we are kind of pulling back the curtain on ski testing.
0:25.6	And to help us out here, we are joined by George Michelson, who is the CEO and co-founder
0:32.2	of the ski monster, and Matt Berkowitz, who is a longtime veteran of the ski industry and the current brand director of the ski monster.
0:42.4	And I think you all are really going to enjoy this conversation because you have seen the way that we have done things at Blister,
0:51.2	but maybe you aren't totally sure why we do things the way we do at Blister.
0:57.4	And I think having George and Matt talk about their own experience with various ski tests
1:03.4	will give you a better sense of how things often go down in our industry, and it might
1:09.6	provide some really helpful context to help you
1:12.6	understand, again, why we set things up so differently at Blister. And I should say, and this might
1:20.6	not come as a surprise to many of you, you know when I start talking about gear testing, I tend
1:26.5	to get pretty fired up, especially when I think that a lot of the way that our industry works, well, that we're not maybe doing it the right way.
1:34.7	So, yeah, there are some rants in this episode, and I probably wouldn't suggest that you listen to this episode with small impressionable children around.
1:45.8	Sorry, small impressionable children.
1:48.2	But as I have said before, if some of you might find a little bit of the language to be
1:53.5	kind of offensive, I still really find it offensive to basically be lying to the community
2:00.3	of skiers out there about all of this really expensive
2:04.1	product and not putting in the time to actually test it thoroughly or even constructing these
2:11.1	tests in such a way where the tests end with the production of meaningful information.
2:20.2	So we can all find different things to be offended by, right? Today's episode of Gear 30 is presented by avocado, which is the manufacturer
	...

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