Popular Stories
In 2010, a new player – 
RAMP Sports founder Mike Kilchenstein.
We’ve employed vacuum molding technology at our factory, and the new process cleaner and more efficient. But we use more expensive components to make our product better – so we sell direct in order to get the margin we need. Our cores cost three times as much as the standard, Kevlar is seven times the costs of fiberglass, and we use higher quality, US-sourced pine resins, not petrochemical-based ones.
A full-layer of Kevlar is being used on the boards this season. We tested many US-made composites; Kevlar resists stretching much more than fiberglass, and provides much more energy and rebound, and absorbs vibration 8 times better than fiberglass.
We use Forest Stewardship Council-certified, domestic bamboo cores, which are nearly four times as hard as the industry standard of poplar. The cores are expensive, but enhance performance – they have that rock solid feel you get from metal GS skis, but ours will still bend while freeskiing.
Our Newsletter
In traditional press molding, the layers of the ski are squashed down at four atmospheres of pressure against a camber plate, in unnatural shapes. The vacuum molding process [that RAMP uses] seems to give the product a dramatically bigger sweet spot. What we do uses a quarter of that pressure, but evenly in every direction, not just down, and retains the natural shape. We found the skis are much easier to use, even our very high-performance boards, as they have a much bigger sweet spot.
We went from zero in sales to $135,000 in our first season, which we considered very good, since nobody had ever heard of us and it was all through our website. Last year it didn’t snow much and the industry plummeted, but we still tripled our business. This season, we plan to triple again, and are so far 600 percent ahead to date on consumer orders. People seem really excited about our new product, our factory, and what we stand for.
