Season Eqpt: helping launch a ski and snowboard brand built not to expire

Most ski and snowboard brands change their graphics every year, and the industry's calendar is built around that change. Season Eqpt was started to do the opposite, and I got to help build it from the first day.

What is Season Eqpt?

Season was founded in 2020 by professional snowboarder Austin Smith and professional skier Eric Pollard, out of Mt. Hood, Oregon. The premise is that equipment shouldn't have a shelf life:

• All-black graphics that never change from year to year.
• Gender-inclusive sizing, with skiing and snowboarding treated as equals.
• A deliberately tiny five-model range.
• A Lifetime Service Pass, free wax and an annual tune, built into the price rather than sold alongside it.

Skis are made in Austria and boards in Dubai. Interbrand named Season a Breakthrough Brand of 2023.

What did I do at Season?

I was a founding team member and Brand Director from 2020 to 2023. The founding work was defining and putting into words the brand thesis: that durable goods only expire because marketing tells them to. Everything else followed from it: graphics that never change, a range that stays small, and service included rather than sold.

“The only thing that makes durable goods like skis and snowboards expire is marketing.”

— from my interview with The Quality Edit

That argument became the company's core positioning, and it still runs through everything Season sells. In 2026 I came back as an independent consultant to turn the founders' thinking into a live operating system for the brand. That project is written up in full as a case study.

What did Outside say about Season?

The Ski Company That Wants to Sell Fewer Skis

Heather Hansman, Outside, December 2020

A few months after launch, Heather Hansman wrote about Season for Outside. The piece takes the tension head on: two athletes who spent their careers launching new models every season, now starting a company in part to get people to buy fewer of them. It's a good read on why the idea mattered then, and it still frames the brand well.

What's the lesson for other brands?

A positioning is only finished when it changes what you make and what you don't. Season's thesis decided the graphics, the range, the price and the service before anyone wrote an ad. That's the test I hold every brand to now: if the strategy doesn't show up in the product, it's a slogan.