Our primary business is skis and ski service. We are careful not to spread ourselves too thin, and to maintain our focus on our core business. But sooner or later ski service involves wax. Our client relationships are ongoing, and we have the expectation that customers who buy skis will be calling us for advice when it comes to preparing the skis for races. Being able to help our customers with wax is a natural extension of the relationships that we work hard to build and maintain.
We do wax the way we do skis. We work with you to understand your needs, and we recommend solutions that fit your circumstances. We have often recommended that customers find a single brand that they like to work with, and learn it really well. That’s a good strategy when you’re going to be doing some basic testing for every event, and you want to have your bases covered without getting distracted by diversions. But it’s not how we wax! Every company has certain waxes that really shine – products with a particularly broad range, or high level of performance. We work to identify those products, and we organize our testing and waxing around the materials we know and trust to be the best through experience. We work with waxes from a lot of different brands, and we’re happy to share our experience and recommendations, particularly if you’ll reciprocate!
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We are the US Importers for Vauhti. Vauhti is one of the three big Finnish wax brands, along with Start and Rex, and all three brands are excellent. Finns are really good at ski wax! We pursued our relationship with Vauhti because of our experience with their kick waxes, which are superb. We have used some of their glide products (like Blackfox fluoro powder and solid) quite a lot in the past, but the 2011-12 season was our first year working with the Vauhti gliders extensively. We had great luck! We won’t try to convince you of anything you’re too smart to believe – there are lots of great wax brands out there. But it didn’t take us long to discover the class of the Vauhti line, and to find success in races. Because of our close relationship with Vauhti as importers we will nearly always test Vauhti wax first, and our incentive to sell it is clearly high. But our credibility and our customer relationships are more important to us than which wax we sell – so we won’t recommend any of this stuff unless we’ve had success with it.
We’ve been fans and consumers of Star wax ever since Len Johnson of Jenex started importing the stuff back in the ’90s. Star is one of two wax companies in the small town of Asiago, Italy. Our connection to the ski industry really started with Len Johnson who has been a tremendous mentor. Len put me in touch with Lars Svensson prior to the 2002 Olympics, where I bought Lars’s grinder to start my grinding operation. Lars was the Star importer for Sweden at the time, so Star has been almost a “house” brand for us from the beginning. We still use a ton of Star paraffin as service wax in the shop because of the outstanding purity and quality of the material, and it’s good working characteristics. Star has been at the forefront of innovation, utilizing advanced nano-ceramic lubricants to create next-generation glidewax performance with their HF nano-ceramic line of race paraffins – it’s not just shop wax!
Start is one of the most-recognized but least-utilized wax brands in the US market. Everybody knows about Start Green, because when it first hit the snow it was the hardest substance you could get onto your ski. Everything else available was waxy while Start Green was hard. If you’ve tried skiing in green conditions lately with paraffin from the early ’80s then you know what a big difference a good cold paraffin makes! These days every company has good cold wax, and Start Green is just a face in the crowd. But, as one of the big-three outstanding Finnish wax brands, along with Vauhti and Rex, Start has stayed at the forefront of development. Most of my current use of Start wax has grown directly out of World Cup service trips where Start is a frequent player both for glide and kick with a lot of outstanding products.
Swix is an industry standard. In addition to being the biggest wax company in the world, their products are very high quality throughout the range. There are domestic programs that compete and win using only Swix glide wax. Domestically, Swix is the brand that other wax companies test against to ensure that their wax is competitive. At a World Cup level I don’t remember ever seeing a wax test without one or two Swix products in it. Because of the high baseline level of quality and reliability Swix is one of only a few companies that I can really recommend as a complete line – a basis for testing and a foundation for expansion. But it’s not only baseline quality that we should talk about. Swix also has some very advanced race-service products worth checking out at any level!
Rode is the original wax brand from Asiago, with about a ten-year head start on Star. Throughout the ski racing world the name Rode evokes an impassioned response from kick-waxing specialists. In a world full of modern kick waxes utilizing all sorts of advanced chemistry the original rode drywaxes and klisters remain perhaps the most-used kick waxes on the World Cup, and form the backbone of the kick box for many teams and service professionals. While all other brands have retained some of the national identity of their country of origin, nobody even thinks of Rode as being Italian. Everybody has made it their own. The continued excellence of the original formulas has not stopped Rode from pushing toward new developments. If you’re serious about kick waxing, you should check out the new Top-Line waxes that have been available for World Cup service for a couple of years now.
Boulder Nordic Sport is the importer for Holmenkol and Ski*Go, and a variety of other excellent products. BNS provides good direct-sales service to teams and individuals. We are very familiar with these brands from our work with BNS and from race service experience domestically and on the World Cup. We can provide these products to our customers, and we will recommend them when they’re the best option.
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