Don’t Buy This!

It took a while, but Eric Pollard eventually drank that Kool-Aid. He knew the ski industry hustle well. He designed his first pro model ski with his sponsor, Line Skis, when he was just 17. In the two decades that followed, it was his job to help design and promote new skis year after year, in the endless cycle of commercialism that encouraged consumers to buy, buy, buy. Most of the changes to the skis each year (if any) were minuscule, or just new graphics on top sheets. It was mostly marketing with very little actual design innovation.

Pollard figured there had to be a better way. “Collectively, our team has experienced the outdoor space for a long time. We wanted to do things differently,” Pollard says. “Specifically, the idea came from the concept of offering something to our community. We decided to just tell it how it is. Let’s not try to pull one over on anyone.”

“Decision fatigue is real, we wanted to tighten the lineup to help people choose when buying our skis and boards.”

Eric Pollard

“We wanted to create a brand that asked the community to rethink their relationship with their equipment. Instead of being encouraged to buy every year, we wanted to encourage people to hold onto their equipment,” Pollard says. They did that by designing durable, long-lasting gear constructed from tried-and-true materials and offering free and discounted tunes and services for the product’s lifetime through Evo, the brand’s lone U.S. retail partner, and Rhythm Service Centers in Japan.

Season Eqpt. gear is sold directly online and through Evo shops in the U.S., Rhythm shops in Japan, and Blue-Tomato stores across Europe. Every ski and snowboard purchased comes with a free mount, unlimited free machine waxing services, free standard tunes yearly, and discounts on additional repairs.

They also wanted to create unisex skis and boards. “My experience over the years is that a lot of the skis I’d designed were essentially co-opted with different top sheets and marketed as women’s skis,” Pollard says. “It was the same product.” Instead of men’s and women’s skis, Season’s offerings run on a broader size range, offering lengths suitable for people of all heights and builds.

In skiing, Pollard has often challenged the status quo. As a co-founder of the ski film company Nimbus Independent, the artsy films he created were like nothing the ski industry had seen before. As the visionary behind some of the most cutting-edge ski top sheet graphics and ski shapes of the 2000s, Pollard first introduced the idea that graphics could span both skis, creating a cohesive look when the skis were side-by-side.

At this point, just a couple of years in, Season is a grand experiment still finding its own path. But so far, they’ve stuck to that original plan of figuring out how to approach things in an entirely different way. “We recognize this is a standing jump. We had no momentum,” Pollard says. “But that didn’t stop us. We believe we can make a difference by doing things differently.”

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