Howdy everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Gear 30 on The Blister Podcast Network.

My name is Luke Kappa. I am the managing editor here at Blister, and I'm coming to you from our home base in Elevation Hotel in Preston, Colorado.

As always, you can check out everything we are doing and reviewing

over at blisterreview.com. Now, today we are taking a closer look at what it takes to

create a brand new ski company from scratch in today's expansive market and how one of the

newest ski brands to come across our radar

went about doing so. To wind back for a moment, a little over a year ago we got some messages

from a ski company I had never heard of, which, to be frank, is pretty rare. But that's also

what made me very curious to try these new skis, which we did over

the past two winters, and that also happened to be the brand's first two years in existence.

Then, at Blister Summit, 2026, I finally got to meet the guy who designed the skis and chat about

his approach to building both the brand and the

skis themselves. Now, in today's conversation, you'll get to hear about all of that straight

from Kevin Schaefer, the founder and engineer of Ellis Skies. Kevin and I got to cover a lot of

topics, including how his experience making longboard skateboards as a kid

impacted his journey to making his own skis, as well as how he settled on Ellis as the brand name,

and I'm almost certain you won't be able to guess the origin. We also get into how he went about

identifying the gaps that he saw in the current ski market

and how he went about prototyping the skis he thought could fill them.

Then we get into the details of the skis in the current Ellis lineup, what Kevin has planned for

the future, and we even get to dive into a few aspects of ski design that Kevin and I both think the industry could be doing a better job of communicating.

Now first, I think it's definitely worth shouting out our weekly gear giveaway this week.

...