@crankset @rhobarll: hey, my name’s Tony - I started Faction waaaay back in like 2004. Normally it’s our international man of mystery Mat Soumet posting to you on NS but I thought i’d speak up to answer some of your questions. We’re a weird bunch of people here - we started as just a group of friends wanting to make skis funnily enough around the same time as the guys at Armada and 4FRNT, and pretty much for the same reason. Skiing was dull and the mainstream brands needed a massive kick up the arse to inject some life into our sport.
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We called ourselves a ‘collective’ (yes that is also our registered company name) because although we were kind of on the outside of mainstream skiing (hence the ‘Faction’) we came from everywhere. In our office in Verbier we have French, Swedish, Scottish, American, Canadian, English, Swiss and I’m Australian all working together. We’ve all spent years working in ski resorts and travelling the world skiing - some of us competitively, others from just working in bars and doing whatever we can to get by and keep the stoke. As we’ve grown we’ve also brought on a few people in London (IT, logistics and key shit like that… but more importantly still passionate skiers who come out to Verbier as often as they can) and opened another office in Breckenridge. Unusually for a ski company our size we don’t use distributors in central Europe and North America. We do it ourselves and deal direct with the local reps and stores and magazines/media. It takes a lot of work but at the end of the day we want to be the ones talking to stores and consumers so we can get more direct feedback and hopefully make a better product.
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Our riders spend a lot of time in our office/s and we all develop the products together. Ideas will go around between us and guys like Adam, Candide, Tim, etc and we design the skis here, sample them then revise. We’re a pretty open, ‘flat’ company and try and use locals and riders where we can if there’s a job we need filling. Etienne’s a great example of a rider who showed some talent in filming and directing who we’ve supported, and a lot of our staff started as interns as well.
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Hope this helps - we might be having a general Q&A session on NS soon so stay tuned, and glad to hear you’re liking what we’re doing.
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Cheers
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-Tony
