After one of the most successful ski launches ever, Peak Ski Co. has collapsed amid acrimony and claims of mismanagement by the high-profile founders of the Montana-based ski-maker.
“It’s such a sad story. It did not need to go down this way,” says Aspen big-mountain skiing legend Chris Davenport, who joined Peak Ski Co. in 2022 as a senior director of skiing and product innovation.
The paychecks stopped coming in shortly after Davenport signed on. Same for freeskiing icon Michelle Parker, who also joined Peak in 2022 as both a big-name athlete and a head of product design.
“It was too good to be true,” Parker says of a contract offer from Peak that drew her away from her longtime ski sponsor Black Crows. “They paid maybe a quarter of the three-year deal.”
Davenport and Parker are lawyered up. They have spent months trying to reach the founders of Peak Ski Co., resort industry veteran Andy Wirth and former ski racing superstar Bode Miller.
The skiers have drafted a breach-of-contract lawsuit, but their attorney worries there’s no money left to pursue.
“It’s kind of hard to imagine how they could treat us this way,” Parker said. “It’s kind of heartless. I don’t feel they were good at business. They certainly have not been upfront, fair or communicative.”
The glitzy Peak Ski Co. showroom in Bozeman, Montana, is closed. The company’s high-profile roster of executives has left the company and its two dozen employees are laid off. Its athletes — including Davenport and Parker — are no longer with the ski maker. Skier JT Holmes – another athlete enlisted by Peak Ski Co. – declined to comment. The company’s website went dark more than a week ago.
Wirth, a ski resort executive with tenures at Steamboat and Palisades Tahoe ski areas, referred all inquiries to Miller, who retired from ski racing in 2017 after 33 World Cup victories and six Olympic medals.
Miller said the closure of the Bozeman headquarters had to do with soaring costs of operations.
“There was no way to sustain the monthly burn rate,” he said in an email to The Sun on Monday.
Miller said several investors made commitments to support the company but the funding never came through.
“Which was one of the factors that led us to where we are at. While that is unfortunate, it alone is not the reason we are shutting down most parts of the company,” Miller said. “Year one was the main problem, we had major challenges that were outside of what we had planned and modeled for, so we had significant debt that continued to roll forward into year two.”
Peak Ski Co. launched in 2021 with a unique ski design that includes a small “keyhole” cutout in front of the toe binding that purported to make the ski more flexible and turnable without sacrificing stability. The company offered six models of skis in its first year.
The company also offered a rare direct-to-consumer e-commerce website and a new automated production process. Wirth and Miller pitched Peak as a promise to revolutionize how skis are made and sold. For a while there, they were on track.
Keyhole design and a new manufacturing process
Miller and Wirth patented the skis’ cut-out keyhole design as well as a tracking device that can be inserted into that opening to help locate lost or stolen skis.
The pair’s 22-page application in 2023 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office argued that the keyhole cutout in the front of the ski required less energy to flex the ski, “allowing easier and quicker turn initiation and shorter radius turns.”
Peak Skis harvested many accolades from ski media heralding the keyhole design. The Snowsports Industries America trade group’s annual consumer report in 2023 ranked Peak Skis among the five most memorable brands after only one season on snow. It was an unprecedented ascent for a brand-new ski company.
But there were signs of trouble early in the Peak arc. Heading into its second season, the company announced a buy-one, get-one-free deal, which typically indicates financial duress. Then came an offer of free bindings with ski purchases. The BOGO and binding deals continued. And the company left several contractors unpaid for events and promotions. Whispers of trouble became more full-throated last fall.
It does not appear that Peak Ski Co. — which produced its skis at the Elan ski factory in Slovenia — sold any skis last year. There are apparently nearly 2,000 pairs at the Elan factory ready to ship once Peak pays the manufacturer.
Miller said he hopes to sell the skis to pay off debts owed to people like Davenport and Parker.
Miller said he and Wirth have “scaled the company down to basically nothing to try to get through this.”
“The purpose of the company was to develop a new manufacturing process and we got stuck because of the year one challenges,” he said. “I hope that we can avoid bankruptcy and see that part of the plan through as it is both really exciting and profitable. We have a plan to completely overhaul the manufacturing process, which is badly needed on a global scale. The skis were great, but a few factors got in the way of us being able to execute on the plan the way we had it set up.”
Jonathan Ellsworth, the founder and editor of Crested Butte’s influential Blister outdoor media company, hosted Miller on Blister’s GEAR: 30 podcast in 2021 to talk about Peak skis. The ski company attended and rented booth space at the annual Blister Summit in 2023, but paid only a portion of those fees, Ellsworth said.
Ellsworth has interviewed hundreds of ski industry innovators who have poured their souls into gear that improves time outside. He’s appalled that Peak appears to have leveraged several of skiing’s most respected athletes, but not paid them.
“Personally, I have had nothing but great conversations with Bode, but Peak’s actions go beyond being irresponsible” Ellsworth said in an interview with The Sun.
Ellsworth also thinks that Andy Wirth and Bode’s lack of communication after a 2024 crowdfunding effort “is indefensible.”
“You just can’t operate like this in the outdoor industry. They are bad actors and they need to be called out and held accountable. You don’t sign on some of the heroes of our sport and then steal from them, nor do you ghost the skiing public,” Ellsworth said.
More than $1.2 million in a crowdfunding campaign
In February 2024, Wirth and Miller launched a crowdfunding campaign that raised a bit more than $1.2 million from 592 investors.
The crowdfunding campaign said Peak Ski Co. had sold more than 4,000 skis in its first year, generating $3 million in revenue. The fundraising effort offered hats and signed posters to 221 investors who donated $500. Donors of $15,000 got two pairs of skis and a tour of the factory. People who donated $50,000 or $100,000 got skis and a ski day with Peak athletes and Bode Miller.
In videos promoting the company and the crowdfunding effort, Wirth said the company was built on an ethos anchored in innovation, performance, precision and grit.
Miller, in a pitch video for the crowdfunding campaign, said his launch of Peak Ski Co. marked “the end of my athletic career and the beginning of my legacy impact on the sport.”
“Now is my time to give back to the sport,” he said.
In December 2024, Peak Skis announced a partnership with a luxury real estate firm — Majestic Realty Collective — that displayed Peak skis at realty offices in mountain communities across the West, including Vail, Telluride, Crested Butte, Breckenridge, Deer Valley, Sun Valley and Lake Tahoe.
Last fall Wirth and Miller crafted a 29-page pitch deck outlining a planned 12-year partnership with Bihler, a family-owned German manufacturing company that was going to change ski production with a swift, automated process. The partnership anticipated a new production process that churned out a pair of skis in as little as 4 minutes, compared with current times of 45 minutes to 75 minutes per pair. The plan called for Bihler to have new production up and running in Germany by the end of 2025 and a facility in Bozeman open by mid 2026.
If the new production strategy — called “Peak Bolt” — gained traction, Wirth and Miller estimated they could license the technology to other ski makers and Peak could produce 40% of the 5.5 million skis and snowboards made every year by 2029.
In addition to a modern overhaul of ski production, the Peak pitch to investors includes growth in the company’s trackable in-ski technology, which they call Peak Loc8.
Other aspirations remain unrealized, too
Wirth and Miller, before launching Peak Ski Co., in 2021 announced plans for a $25 million, 125-student ski academy at Grand County’s Granby Ranch ski area, a resort Wirth managed for a couple years as the resort navigated financial struggles. The academy plan never unfolded.
Miller, the most decorated American male skier ever and a father of seven, has been involved in several startup ventures, including partnerships with upstart ski-makers Crosson and Bomber. He joined Aspen-based Aztech Mountain ski outerwear company as chief innovation officer in 2016. He’s been involved in a tech company, a base layer company and a nutrition brand. He is the chief innovation officer at Alpine-X, which announced indoor ski facilities in Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas.
Miller said he appreciated all the support for Peak Ski Co.
“And I apologize for the situation if it has frustrated people, it has frustrated myself and the great people we have had working at Peak as well,” he said. “I believe in our plan and hope to see it to completion.”
For a couple years at least, it looked like Peak Ski Co. was going to be Miller’s post-Olympic gold medal. Now it appears to be yet another miss.
“I call it the hubris of Peak,” said Davenport, who was supposed to be the head of ski innovation for the company. “They pretended to know everything and would not listen to input from veterans on their team. Not only did they not listen, they would often do the opposite.”
Parker, the head of product, said she “didn’t feel heard at all” as she worked with the company.
”I don’t feel anything I said was taken into consideration,” she said. “We came onboard as a major part of the company, but they did not let us play any role in the company.”
Davenport said in his 30 years as a professional skier working with several of the industry’s top brands, “I’ve never seen such egregious business behavior.”
“It might be unprecedented in the ski industry that such super well-known industry veterans could make so many huge financial mistakes,” he said.