First off, Sander is an awesome guy and it was really rad getting to know him, skiing together and working on developing a ski together. Sander AND Giray Dadali were both equally driving the design of the new Friend ski working with our engineer Francois and I and together the team created a really awesome pow ski!
Sander joined us in the fall, and by February the ski was 100% ready to go, it took a ton of our resources to make that happen in such a short time but it was well worth it. I promised Sander we would create a graphic collab with him as we had done in the past with other athletes. However I already had been working with an artist to create a graphic for this ski and being that a ski that wide sells far less than any other models we couldn't justify creating 2 graphics, twice the quantity at that time. So I planned on adding one potentially in season with Sander's graphic depending on how sales went and definitely by the following year.
Sander is correct we did not pay him for riding our skis, instead we always pay athletes royalty on collab product and since there was none for the upcoming season there was no plan to pay him at that time. Unfortunately Sander never brought up his financial needs, and I never asked so instead we went 6 months working together and one day mid summer he called up out of the blue and said "I just accepted sponsorship from Dynastar".
I've worked with ski athletes one-on-one for over 25 years and this was the first time an athlete ever left telling me it's because they needed to be paid more... WITHOUT ever having a conversation about it prior. It was weird to me and made me wish we had what would have been a super easy conversation prior because it honestly we would have worked out a fair compensation but at that point he had already made up his mind, so there it was.