Why We Started Outsider

TL;DR: We started Outsider because Sherry McConkey told me that Shane McConkey had wanted to build a new kind of ski — one that could carve groomers and float powder with equal grace. He called it The Shlong. That conversation lit the fuse.

If you're still with us, here's the longer version.

More Than the Money

There are plenty of ways to make money, especially if you live somewhere business is buzzing and capital is cheap.

But life is more than engineering and earnings. A career spent optimizing for business outcomes is a thin life if it isn't tethered to something you actually care about. We started Outsider to point our work at something bigger: raising our own consciousness to recognize our importance and what we can do better for the planet and for ourselves.

Two threads run through everything we do — life and planet.

Life

Life is meant to be lived with passion. We feel most ourselves when we're absorbed in something difficult and beautiful — when the world contracts to a single line. When future and past folds into the present for a short period of time.

But the sports that produce those moments are demanding. Skiing especially. It costs money, time, mental bandwidth, the ideal conditions, and years of practice before you reach the level where the magic actually happens. Most of us never get there, or never progress to the next level — to that ultimate syncing with the higher powers we so often see in art. After a while we give up, and live our lives inside that box, bashing less and less against those imaginary walls that our suboptimal gear and our own thoughts have built around us.

We started Outsider to help people get out of that box — quite literally, to get outside with the gear that match the conditions. To help you discover that ultimate flow, to sync with nature, and to free your mind.

Planet

Every action has a consequence. The moment we hop into a car — electric or gas — we use resources. Every pair of skis we buy and travel with contributes to pollution and material use. If we can replace two pairs of skis with one, we cut that footprint in half.

There's a school of thought that says the answer is to stop. To shrink. To treat humanity as a failed species that should quietly bow out, restricting what we do until we vanish gracefully. We disagree. That path is sad, and it's conflict-oriented dressed up as virtue. It suppresses passion. It confiscates freedom. Freedom that we all thrive, and that our outdoors provide.

We think the answer is the opposite: be so efficient, so thoughtful, so well designed that we extend the timeline long enough for real solutions to arrive. Keep the things that make humanity want to wake up in the morning, and make them dramatically better. A civilization full of passion is a civilization that solves hard problems.

The goal isn't to make people feel guilty about getting outside — it's to make sure they can keep doing it for generations, while being conscious about nature. Our work is built on that belief. Products that enable us to do more with less.

Come find us outside.