Michael Parris is the owner, heart, soul and brains of Igneous custom skis and snowboards. His shop is based in Jackson, Wyoming, along with his home, life, ambitions and dreams. His skis and snowboards are an extension of his customer’s personalities. He fuses hardwoods, composites and sintered graphite bases with more than 25 years of experience to build rugged skis and boards that look just as good on your wall, as they do charging down the mountain.
How does someone testing robots in Antarctica to locate meteorites start making custom skis in Wyoming? It began on the ski hill.
Michael learned to ski at Blue Knob, a small ski hill in central Pennsylvania. His dad instructed there, his grandma worked in the ticket office and Michael would eventually patrol the same ski hills as a high school student.
Like a skin track to the summit, Michael’s path to building custom skis took a circuitous route. After a gap year in Jackson Hole to ski and save up money for college, he went on to study architecture and sculpture at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. During college breaks he’d head west to ski and catch up with friends.
Michael had a background in carpentry, woodworking and tinkering. During his visits he’d consult a friend of his, Adam Sherman, who was building skis in his garage. Like Michael, he saw an opportunity for a different kind of ski using untraditional materials and construction. While Michael finished his degree in Pennsylvania, he continued to go back and forth to Jackson to ride and consult Adam’s ski building process.
When Michael graduated, he landed a job at the robotics institute. He worked there for several years, learning on the fly about systems integration, engineering and composite fabrication—skill sets that would eventually help him and Adam develop skis.
When NASA decided not to renew funding, Michael returned to the mountains. Adam and Michael reunited in Jackson in 1999 and began growing the business. With Adam’s background in finance and Michael’s craftsmanship and engineering knowledge, the duo had one goal – make rugged skis that perform well.
Adam, Michael and his friends weren’t just making skis. They were making skis in shapes and sizes no one had ever seen before. In the Tetons, Michael often reached for his snowboard because it allowed him to stay on top of the snow and let the natural terrain features influence is riding style. On steep terrain or in deep powder, skiing required jump turns or short turns to maintain your speed. Michael wanted to ride his skis like a snowboard.
In the mid–90s most ski companies followed the same basic formula: make several thousand pairs in European factories and ship them overseas. The thought of dirt bags making skis in their garage broke this mold. Selling and marketing on the internet gave the business even more momentum.
The idea of bypassing the traditional sales funnel of the ski industry and selling custom skis directly to the consumer made sense on paper. Even better, they thought they could automate most of this process with custom machinery and Michael’s background in robotics and systems design.
Word eventually spread about the garage-built skis. Riders in the west were starting to realize the benefits of wide short skis that performed like a snowboard. Not only that, but the construction could sustain rock strikes and were built to last a few seasons.
They secured investment from friends and family to acquire equipment, grow the business and begin automating the process. Eventually they even started to sell skis to shops around North America.
Demand increased, but so did their clarity. Building skis all day took away from what they loved – skiing. Not only that, the automation separated Michael from the process of working with his hands. Punching numbers into a computer felt too sterile.
Their success was a distraction from the original mission. It made them realize that perhaps everyone’s idea of a successful business wasn’t theirs. Everyone can tell you how to grow a business, but few people told them how to have a sustainable business that didn’t tear them away from the love and joy of why they opened a business in the first place – to make great skis.
They eventually scaled back production, returning to their roots of building truly one-of-a-kind skis and snowboards by hand without quotas to meet or dealers to appease. Not everyone who strikes out to create a business wants to be a millionaire; perhaps they simply want to make a great product, live a balanced life and do what they love.
Many skiers know what types of skis they like but could never explain why they like it. They may not be able to tell you the ski has just enough torsional flex and camber, but they can tell you it doesn’t tire them out in the bumps and crud.
When you order skis or a snowboard, Michael begins with three questions: where do you ride, how do you ride and why do you ride? This helps him home in on a zesty recipe of flex, camber, side cut and material for shredding.
Michael uses wood cores for his skis and borrows technology usually reserved for race skis such as sintered graphite bases, to build skis and boards that charge season after season. He tweaks the construction profile of every ski or snowboard to suit the customer’s needs. A wise businessman might argue his skis are too durable, but for Michael there are no compromises. His relationship with the building process and his customers allows him to make skis that are truly one-of-kind – and he can even refine a custom design based on how a customer’s skiing style changes over time.
The woodgrain top sheets give the skis and boards a fine art aesthetic, something most would be happy to hang on their wall. At first using wood top sheets was an aesthetic choice, it turns out the wood provided the perfect blend of vibration dampening, durability and responsiveness.
The benefit of being such a small and versatile operation is that they can fine tune the process on the fly; make a pair of skis one week, ski it the next and build another pair the following week building off of what they liked or did not like.
Michael has been skiing for 50 years, snowboarding for 40 and making skis and snowboards for 25 years. Although this process has evolved over the years, his goal remains – to build the best skis and snowboards possible.
In the first five years of the business, Adam and Michael were building skis for people who skied like they did. The past 10 years he has begun to tweak his designs for a wider customer base – people who don’t ski 100 days a year and need something that isn’t built for going warp speed.
Beyond the shop is a life bound by the dynamism of the mountains. Michael finds inspiration in the geology of the playground he calls home. He loves the duality of this ecosystem—the permanence of mountains, valleys and rivers; that come alive with wind, weather, sun and snow. He hikes, backpacks, climbs and recently sails in this almighty spectacle of nature and is grateful to do what he does – even if it means he’s not getting rich.
Building skis and snowboards is a seasonal business. He’s recently started to take his skills sets beyond the ski press and returned to his wood working roots; building furniture, cabinets and even an exhibit for the children’s museum in Jackson.
Check out Michael’s custom skis and snowboards for yourself, or better yet, order a pair and savor the bliss of riding something that was engineered for your riding style – because it was.
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